The ending of the calendar year brings with it a wonderful variety of holidays, traditions and celebrations from a world of cultures. It is the ideal time to create awareness in children that all families do not celebrate the same holidays or traditions; however, every celebration is important, has meaning and is valued. During the month of December, Montessori classrooms have individual activities that celebrate each individual holiday, with a final all-school community peace celebration prior to a winter break holiday.
Montessori Classroom Holiday Activities
Holiday celebrations that are not familiar to a child become meaningful and interesting when it is a tradition shared by someone they know. As families join a Montessori community, they are asked if they would be interested in sharing their culture and traditions informally during class with the children. During these visits, parents often choose to read a traditional children’s story, offer a small taste of a special holiday food, show pictures of festivities, or bring traditional clothing or music. These visits occur all year long as families are available and holidays are celebrated.
For holidays that are not represented by classroom families, the Montessori teacher will introduce books from the library, songs and music, and pictures or important authentic objects representing each holiday into the environment for the children to discover and explore. Aside from these small additions, Montessori classrooms for young children do not decorate or create any additional excitement surrounding holidays, but rather keep the established day-to-day routine stable for the children to feel centered, calm and peaceful.
Winter Peace Celebration
Despite the many differences of winter holidays celebrated throughout the world, the overall themes of family, community and culture can be combined to include all with a simple celebration of peace. While most schools have a holiday party of some sort, a Montessori school has a whole school community event during which teachers, administrators, parents, grandparents, children and previous students come together to celebrate the common goal of peace.
Activities for the peace celebration can be varied, however the main focus is to encourage all families to work together to create something for the whole community. The idea that each person’s contribution is valued and needed in order for the activity to be successful instills in a child that she is important and valued. The activities at the peace celebration become the new holiday traditions of the school community.
Create a Peace Garland
A ribbon peace garland is an easy activity for a whole school community to complete at a peace celebration. Each color of ribbon has a special meaning and every person can choose which colors and how many of each ribbons to add to the community garland that will be hung in a prominent place in the school.
- White ribbon: Hope
- Orange ribbon: Peace in the Classroom
- Purple ribbon: Peace in the Family
- Pink and Blue ribbons: Respect for Gender
- Red ribbon: Love
- Green ribbon: Respect of the Environment
- Yellow ribbon: International color of Peace
Strips of ribbon should be precut prior to the celebration and can be fastened with glue dots, staples or clear tape. Families enjoy choosing which colors to add and sometimes choose to write special notes, names or dates on each strip of each ribbon before connecting them to the community garland. The children are always amazed how long and beautiful the garland is when it is complete with everyone’s individual ribbons.
Create a Peace Quilt
While every family has different holidays and traditions, peace is universal. A peace quilt activity offers each family a blank square of paper on which to draw their idea of peace represented in words and pictures. An assortment of art materials is available to encourage creativity, such as markers, glue, beads, yarn, feathers, felt, pom poms, or foam pieces.
An empty wall is designated at the new home for the community peace quilt. As each family completes their square, it is taped to next to the last finished square. Every square is an equal size, because every idea of peace is equal. The peace quilt continues to grow as each family adds their one small square to create a large and beautiful representation of peace.
Every holiday celebration that a school community offers to children needs to be meaningful and be inclusive of all children and families. Montessori environments create awareness of holidays celebrated around the world to children through meaningful activities, classroom visitors, sampling of different foods and reading stories. A whole school community peace celebration is the culmination of the winter holiday season during which all are welcome and encouraged to work together as community to celebrate peace in a meaningful way.
Jocelyn Scotty - A freelance educational writer, certified Montessori teacher, former teacher educator and school administrator, Jocelyn is also the ...
