Holidays Around the World: 5 Winter Festivals, Grades 2-5

Five winter festivals, five ways families celebrate, one print-and-go pack. Holidays Around the World takes Grades 2-5 on a tour of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, and Lunar New Year, with a short reading, comprehension questions, and hands-on activities for every festival, so students learn the customs and the meaning behind them, not just the names.

The pack opens with a reading about how light ties all five festivals together and a comparison chart showing when each one happens, how long it lasts, its special light, and its special food. Christmas brings a reading about celebrations around the world, a traditions matching activity across eight countries, a ten-word scramble, and gift math with addition, subtraction, and multi-step problems. Hanukkah brings the Festival of Lights, a dreidel game with rules and a record sheet, menorah math that builds to the 44-candle total, and a twelve-word word search. Kwanzaa covers the seven principles with a matching activity, kinara candle math with fractions, patterns, and counting, plus symbols to label and color. Diwali offers a diya coloring page, a rangoli symmetry drawing, a five-days sequencing task, and diya math. Lunar New Year finishes the tour with zodiac sequence puzzles, including 2026 as the Year of the Horse, red envelope money math, and a lantern coloring and wish-writing page.

A holiday review quiz and a my-winter-festival writing prompt close the student pages, and full answer keys cover every keyed activity. Festival dates, customs, and meanings were checked against standard reference sources, and where a custom varies by family or region, the pack names the most widely shared version. Print-and-go on US Letter paper, black-and-white friendly throughout, it fits December and January social studies units, reading centers, morning work, sub plans, and homeschool.