My favorite part of holiday activities (at any time of the year!) is learning about different traditions students have. When designing activities, the key is to let students be creative and tell the class about themselves. Here are some activities my students have enjoyed:

• Share a winter memory – Using a popular pre-writing strategy of identifying each sense, students animate a winter memory in Scratch. By Decemeber, my students are already familiar with Scratch, but it could also be a directed exploratory activity.
• Paper circuits – There are numerous templates available online for paper circuits and greeting cards. I prefer to give my students creative freedom to make whatever type of card they want. As you can see, it doesn’t matter what time of year it is – I get all sorts of holidays!

• Light shows – Similar to the paper circuits, I get all sorts of awesome light shows to music when they get the freedom to create using whatever microcontroller or physical computing device we’re currently working with.