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Submitted by: Mel

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A great way to start a unit on celebrations is to ask children to talk about their own birthday celebrations and the things they do on their birthdays. They could even bring something in from a birthday celebration to share with the class like a photograph. Ask the children how they feel about their birthday and why it is special. You could then ask the children why they celebrate their birthdays and start them thinking about why people celebrate in general. This could lead into other celebrations in their own culture and explore why these celebrations are important to their own culture. After investigating their own cultural celebrations, then move into other cultures.. ask children what they want to know.. or as the unit is progressing, record childrens questions so you can go back to them when they are investigating celebrations from other cultures. You will find as this unit progresses, the children will become interested in a particular aspect and you can move in the direction that the children are taking.

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Submitted by: Kathryn Davies

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The ABC have a great series looking at Celebrations. You can buy it online. Its a part of 'For the Juniors' series.

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Submitted by: david

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I did a celebrations unit as my final prac for university. I used the book seven more sleeps as my primary text. I read only a small amount each week and throughout that week we would begin discussing what we need to do. I also had a large box that was wrapped up in beautiful celebration paper. The prep children each were able to feel the box, talk about what they thought was in the box but were not able to see what was in it until near the end. The anticipation and excitement was fantastic. We finished with a family BBQ down at a park. The children made and planned everything for the celebration. Good luck you will do great.

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Submitted by: Elle

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Hi, I work at an International school in Turkey. I teach Kindergarten and we teach a unit on celebrations. We are lucky to have people from all over the world right here so we generally have parents and teachers come and share an activity or tell, show pics etc of a celebration from their culture or somewhere else they have lived. Over the course of the unit we make a big chart with some of the elements of celebrations: food, people, costumes, decorations, light, song/dance/music, event, religion and season. As each person presents we talk about these aspects to lead the kids to recognise that there are similarities to celebrations all around the world. Some of the more unique celebrations that we have had: Festival of Light (Lyon), I love Santa Lucia (Sweden), here in Turkey they have a circumcision celebration which we do cause it is K aged boys that have the big parties (!!!! interesting discussions), Hogmannay (Scotland), Juneteenth (Rastafarian). Laterna (Germany) I love this unit.

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Submitted by: Lou

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I have done a celebrations unit but earlier in the year for Australia Day, Valentine's Day and birthdays. I use Possum Magic as a stepping stone and culminate in a Birthday Party for Possum Magic.[One of the years we did it the book was 21]We do all sorts of writing activities around the book.- cloze, sequencing,letter writing, story grammar,SOSE.[mapping] art-fireworks, Tand E we made party hats, science- animals/possums. I can send you examples if you are interested. The "Light" idea sounds lovely and may be more appropriate for this time of year though.

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Submitted by: Hillary

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Hi, I did this years ago, but it was always nice. It centered around "light" and then I took different celebrations that included "light" Divali, Chanukah, Christmas, Winter Soltice, Ramadan (inEgypt they use lanterns) etc. hope this helps! I will post a song we sung too later.

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