Holidays Around the World PowerPoint Lessons and Activities for First and Second Grade

Do you teach holiday traditions around the world to your students? It's amazing to think that across the world, children put their shoes out for St. Nicholas Day! I always loved teaching about holidays around the world to my first grade class. After some discussion with my second graders, I realized that they have forgotten basically ALL of it! They knew something about wooden shoes and that's about it.

That's when I decided to take on holidays around the world a second time around, the second grade way and we are getting out our maps and globes once again! I made this holidays around the world PowerPoint lesson to use with my kiddos over the next two weeks during our oh so short social studies block. Boy was it fun researching all of the different traditions and learning about throwing porridge on the ceiling and all sorts of good stuff!

I learned so much myself in the process of researching the various celebrations so I know my class will too! As an introduction to each country we study, I am using the PowerPoint sort of as a big book on the SMART Board. There are a few slides for each country I selected.
 It includes Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

Here is just a sample of the 70 page file:

 I'm pretty sure my kiddos will be interested and engaged with these colorful slides.

If you are interested in something like this to add to your unit, you can see the full description{here}. 

:)