Christmas lessons tend to be popular with students and can include lots of seasonal vocabulary, but are also often full of language that is only useful once a year. It therefore makes sense to combine the Xmas topic with another language point, the easiest and most generally useful of which is grammar. This article gives some ideas on how to practise talking about the past, present and future around Xmas time, and there is another article with similar ideas on other grammar points like relative clauses and uncountable nouns.
Teaching present tenses in Xmas lessons
Teaching Present Simple in Xmas lessons
This is a good tense for this topic, as Xmas is a thing which happens repeatedly, which is exactly what Present Simple is used for. The simplest activity is students guessing Xmas traditions in different countries like “In _________, people usually eat fish on Xmas Eve”, “Santa often puts presents under the ______________” and “In the UK, people often eat cranberry” + “sauce with turkey”.
The adverbs of frequency in these sentences can also be used in the possibly more useful activity of trying not to overgeneralise in statements about Xmas like “American children write letters to Santa”.
Teaching Present Continuous in Xmas lessons
This can be done with students miming or drawing “You are opening a present”, “You are carving the turkey”, etc for other people to guess. Alternatively, they could compete to make the best mime or best picture to represent that Present Continuous sentence.
Teaching Present Simple and Continuous in Xmas lessons
The miming and guessing activity above can have a Present Simple stage added where students get one point for guessing “You are decorating a Xmas tree” and another point for correctly guessing that person’s habits with “You decorate a Xmas tree every year” or “You never decorate a Xmas tree”.
Teaching past tenses in Xmas lessons
Whatever past tenses students know can be practised with a storytelling activity where students use vocabulary that you give them like “sing”, “chimney” and “rip” to make an interesting story about last Xmas.
Students can also do a variation on the miming activities above where they stop before the other person guesses with “(When I said stop) you were pulling a Xmas cracker”, etc, then maybe guess their real past Xmases with “You didn’t pull a Xmas cracker last year”, “You have never pulled a Xmas cracker”, etc.
You could also write a trivia quiz with a mix of whatever past tenses you want to practice, like “How many Xmas cards did Americans send in 2021?”, “According to the famous Xmas carol, what were the shepherds doing when an angel appeared to tell them about the birth of baby Jesus?” and “Had Jesus already been born in the year 1AD/ 1CE?”, perhaps with students completing gapped versions of the same questions before or after answering them.
Teaching used to in Xmas lessons
Students complete sentences with used to or Present Simple depending on if they have stopped or not. These could be trivia like “British people __________________ (often eat) goose on Xmas Day” and “The British King _______________ (give) a speech on Xmas Day”, or personal statements like “You ________________ believe in Santa” and “You ______________ listen to Jingle Bells on CD”.
Teaching Present Perfect in Xmas lessons
Students answer all Present Perfect questions about Xmas (“Have you ever carved a turkey?”) with “Yes, I have”, even when that isn’t true. Their partners then ask follow-up questions to try to work out if the “Yes” is true or not.
Teaching future tenses in Xmas lessons
As Xmas lessons are usually given before Xmas, it makes a lot of senses to talk about the topic with Present Continuous, going to, will, would like, etc.
Teaching going to in Xmas lessons
Students say how they are going to prepare for a future action that their partner should guess, e.g. saying “I’m going to drive into the countryside”, “I’m going to find a forest”, “I’m going to take out my saw”, etc for “You are going to get a Xmas tree”.
Looking a bit further ahead, the end of the year is a good time for students to make New Year Resolutions for their English language learning next year, e.g. with gaps to complete like “I’m going to read ____________________” and “I’m going to learn ______________ words a week”.
Teaching going to and will in Xmas lessons
The New Year Resolutions activity above can have “will” added to it if students look at each other’s ideas and say “I think you will be able to do more than that”, “I don’t think that will be possible”, etc.
If you can find a suitable video like Merry Xmas Mr Bean and freeze during it, students can make predictions both for what is just about to happen with “going to” and for the consequences of that with “will”, e.g. “He is going to try to find his watch. His hand will get stuck in the turkey”.
Teaching will in Xmas lessons
Students choose a sentence that they think might be true about a future Xmas like “I’ll spend Xmas day with my grandchildren” or “A robot Santa will deliver presents from Amazon” and secretly write the first year when they think that might happen, e.g. “2040”. They read out the sentence and give hints like “Much earlier” and “A little later” until their partner guesses exactly the year that they wrote, then discuss if that is likely to be true or not.
To practise will for spontaneous intentions, students can respond to “Potatoes have sold out everywhere” and “My oven has broken” with “We’ll have sweet potato instead”, “I’ll lend you mine”, etc. To make this more challenging, you can give students a list of Xmas vocabulary that they have to use in each situation and response, crossing off the words or discarding the cards as they use them.
Future tense reviews for Xmas lessons
Students complete blanked sentences like “I ___________________ get a big present this year” with the correct future tenses, then their partner guesses if their sentences are “You are going to get a big present this year”, “You won’t get a big present this year”, “You would like to get a big present this year”, etc.
Other activities with gapped sentences include listening to just the part that was written and guessing which sentence it was put into, and reading out a mix of true and false sentences as a bluffing game.
Tense reviews in Xmas lessons
Some or all of the tenses above can be practised with a trivia quiz with a mix of tenses, or with students describing and guessing Xmas vocabulary with hints like “I pulled one last Xmas”, “People used to make their own from some card with a little bit of gunpowder” and “I’d like to get a better gift in mine this year”.
Teaching passive voice in Xmas lessons
The passive version of one, some or all of the tenses above can be practised with trivia quizzes (“During whose reign was a Xmas tree first decorated in Buckingham Palace?”) and guessing games similar to those described above.