Celebrating the holidays as a family and passing on traditions is an important part of every culture. While your students have likely grown up with traditions of their own, winter is a great time of year to broaden their worldview and explore together the history, traditions, and special meaning behind the various winter holidays celebrated around the world!

The photo of this bulletin board from Heather Gibbs is a little blurry, but we're sure you can get the gist of how awesome it is anyway! How great are the three-dimensional elements?! And the details - the snowy window panes, the chair rail, etc. - are just phenomenal! Perfect for a study of winter holidays celebrated around the world, wrap up a new fact to explore each day leading up to Christmas break and have your crafty kiddos decorate the tree with traditional holiday decorations, symbols, etc.

Christmas Around The World

Along with allowing us to feature her fabulous design, Heather also provided instructions for creating the board!

• The background is gold wrapping paper, brown felt and the base board is thin wood with white paint.
• The windows - those were my favorite part. I used construction paper to create the picture and then used a white picture frame to put it in. Then I used the same white painted wood sticks (as were used to create the chair rail, etc.) and glued them to the frame so it would look like a window. Then I used spray snow on the edges to make it look like it was iced over.
• The wrapped boxes were blocks used out of my kids blocks center and they each had a child's name on the box.
• The tree was the most difficult part. I used a tri-fold board and garland. I used bag wire ties and punched holes in the board and ties the wire ties around garland and shaped into tree. Then I cut the cardboard the same shape. That is rope that I used to decorate the tree and the ornaments are pictures of the kids that I took and they made the frame.
• [To decorate the tree,] I took the ideas of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Indian holidays. The rope is used on trees in India, the ornaments are Jewish and Christian holidays with a cross and a dreidel on it