The New Year in ELA means new opportunities for reading and writing! Get your students pumped by providing activities that get them to embrace a growth mindset, develop a vision for the upcoming year, learn about New Year’s customs in other cultures, read literature and informational text on the topic of New Years, summarize the sequence of events that led to January being the lucky month chosen to start each year, write a poem, and more. Here are 10 ideas for reading and writing in English language arts in January!

1) New Year, New Mindset: As a bellringer or a 10-minute “quick write” session, have students respond with their thoughts on this quote by Neil Gaiman, a well-known and respected author: 

2) Vision Boards: Vision boards are amazing because they get you to envision what your future could look like and then manifest what it will actually take to make your dreams come true. You envision yourself succeeding at something — either very specifically — such as “going to college in the fall with scholarships,” “getting in shape this year” — or perhaps more broadly, such as “the life I want to be living in five years.” Then, you make a visual representation of it, such as a collage of images and phrases or perhaps just a simple web diagram. In the context of the English language arts classroom, perhaps just have student turn in an 8 1/2″ x 11″ vision board that contains at least 5 sentences and 5 images. You decide!

OR HERE’S A TWIST: INSTEAD OF HAVING STUDENTS DO BORING CHARACTER ANALYSIS/BOOK REPORTS, HAVE THEM MAKE VISION BOARDS FOR LITERARY CHARACTERS!

3. Write Resolutions Characters Should Make: While I think you should have students write resolutions in ELA to start off the new year, I also think it would be fun to have them come up with resolutions they think some characters in literature should make. You could ask students to choose different characters from literature you’ve read together, or perhaps you want to assign each student a different character. In any case, it would be fun to have each student share one resolution with the class at the end. 

4. Delve Into New Year’s Poetry : I found  a couple of great collections of literary poems related to the New Year: 1) The Poetry Foundation’s collection of New Year’s Poems, and 2) A major book publisher’s selection of Eight Beautiful New Year’s Poems.  Have each student select one poem and do a quick analysis identifying the poet speaker, mood/tone, theme, message, setting, rhyme scheme, etc.

5. Learn about Winter Sports!

Read, Write, Research All About Sled Dog Racing: Using my FREE ELA/Social Studies printables (also digital), have students read, write, research, all about sled dog racing: a winter sport most popular in the Arctic regions of the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and some European countries. The sport involves the timed competition of teams of  sled dogs that pull a sled with the musher standing on the runners.

A sled dog race was a demonstration sport at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, and again in Oslo, and again in the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer. However, it is not currently an official event in the Olympics.

And Read About the Upcoming Winter Olympic Games: Have students read an interesting FREE 1-page informational text passage (with writing extensions) that explains when the Winter Olympic Games debuted, when they are held and why, how host cities are chosen, which sports compete, and the ideals of the International Olympic Committee.

Just in time for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games coming in February!