Have a great time with your middle school students before sending them off on their Christmas break by planning for a successful week. Students are often thinking about the holidays and not school work in the days leading up to the break. This can make it tricky to manage student behavior and keep students focused on learning.
Ease into the holidays by creating engaging math experiences for them that will hold their attention and keep their focus on learning.
Give into the holidays by using winter and Christmas math activities that are just right for middle school! Here are some of my favorites!
Christmas Math Crafts for Middle School
Your students will have fun creating these math crafts on topics perfect for middle school. They can also be used to decorate for holiday door decorating contests or other school festivities.
The Prime Factorization Christmas Tree requires zero teacher prep and just a few supplies for the students, but this activity makes a great math center for a winter break station rotation.
If you cannot use Christmas activities, but still want to have winter fun, this pennant craft may be perfect for your classroom. Instead of creating Christmas trees, this set has beautiful winter trees with pinecones and cardinals to practice prime factorization.
These fun penguin pennants provide practice with an important math skill for middle school. Students create cross-shaded area models to represent fraction multiplication. Winter wreaths allow students to practice fraction, decimal, and percent equivalence in a hands-on way. Once your students finish their pennants, create a beautiful math display with all of their work!
Christmas Fraction Games
This BINGO Game is a crazy fun way to review simplifying fractions with your middle school students. In this game, students have a “snowball” fight with the task cards. Yes! You actually ball up the task cards and toss them around the room like snowballs.
Download this game for free right here! Watch the video to see how it works.
This next game is a Christmas math favorite. It also features simplifying fractions but is perfect for a small group or a math center. In this game, students match up cards and use the winter scene to check their work. Get this free center in the Leaf and STEM Learning store on TPT.
Christmas Puzzle Activities
Can middle school students have fun while learning about algebraic relationships? They sure can if they are using marshmallows as manipulatives! In this hands-on learning experience, students create and solve visual equations that use marshmallows as the constants and cocoa mugs as the variables (think a sweeter version of algebra tiles).
Students use real or pretend marshmallows to discover how many are hidden in the cocoa mugs. This activity is also a great excuse to serve up some cocoa to your middle school students who may be a little too old to watch the Polar Express again this year!
These no-prep worksheets offer lots of Christmas math fun for your middle school classroom. There are multi-step math puzzles, logic puzzles, and coloring puzzles.
In the multi-step puzzles, students use logic and their knowledge of fractions and percents to discover how many toys Santa’s elves are making or how many cookies Santa will eat during his rounds.
Introduce your students to classic logic puzzles with this Christmas-themed pair. Your students can use the clues to figure out who is the secret Santa and which order the reindeer will pull the sled this year.
Finally, have your students solve order of operations questions and integer math problems to color the Christmas scenes. Even big middle schoolers love to color!
