Classroom Tips to Navigate the Holiday Season with Calm and Confidence
December and the Holiday season often come filled with emotion—joy, excitement, but also stress, pressure, fatigue, and anxiety. Between school events and family activities, it’s not uncommon for students to feel overwhelmed.
Also in this blog we’ll explore realistic, classroom-ready strategies designed to help students regulate their emotions, stay focused, and maintain academic confidence during a holiday season that can be as challenging as it is special.
👉 You will learn:
How stress impacts learning and why identifying it early makes all the difference during all the busy holiday season.
Three simple practices to reduce anxiety in the classroom without changing your lesson plan.
Why game-based learning supports emotional regulation and boosts focus.
Quick routines you can implement tomorrow, even with large groups and limited time.
How Stress Impacts Learning
When a student experiences stress, the brain shifts into “survival mode.” This often happens more frequently during the holiday season, when routines are disrupted and excitement levels rise. In this state, key areas such as the prefrontal cortex—responsible for attention, reasoning, and working memory—reduce their activity.
This can show up as:
Decreased ability to concentrate
Difficulty following instructions
Irritability or frustration
Lower information retention
Lack of motivation or disengagement
By recognizing these signs and incorporating short regulation strategies helps students regain the calm and focus they need in order to learn.
Game-based learning does more than boost motivation—it provides a structured environment where students can experience strong emotions such as frustration, excitement, surprise, or joy in a safe and controlled space.
According to recent research, game play supports the development of socio-emotional skills by helping children:
Recognize their emotions
Express them appropriately
Practice frustration tolerance
Develop basic self-regulation strategies
Moreover, games also offer immediate feedback and multiple opportunities to try again, which reduces fear of failure and strengthens a sense of competence. Here are some examples of minigames from our platform that you can implement for free in your classroom this Holiday Season!
Get ready to sharpen your math skills by creating delicious burgers! In this game, you solve math expressions using numbers, operations, and grouping symbols to craft the perfect burger recipe.
Embark on an educational adventure with Angry Birds Decimals, a game designed to sharpen your decimal arithmetic skills!
To access them, sign up for free on Legends of Learning, then search for these games once you’re logged in. You’ll find these and over 2,000 standards-aligned math, science, and US history games to support your students all year long.
➡️ Three Simple Practices to Reduce Anxiety in the Classroom during the Holiday Season
These techniques take little time, don’t disrupt your lesson flow, and can significantly impact student well-being, especially when holiday season stress is at its peak.
1. One-Minute Mindfulness
Mindfulness doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, just 60 seconds of focused attention can help the brain “reset.” Try this:
Invite students to softly close their eyes or lower their gaze.
Guide them: “Inhale for a count of four… exhale for four. Notice how your body feels in the chair…”
Repeat three times.
💡 This brief pause improves self-regulation and reduces accumulated tension.
2. Balloon Breathing
Perfect for younger learners and surprisingly effective for adolescents because it adds a visual element. How to do it:
Ask students to place their hands on their abdomen.
Instruct them to imagine inflating a balloon inside their belly as they inhale.
As they exhale, they “deflate” the balloon slowly.
Continue for 30 seconds to 1 minute.
💡 This practice calms the nervous system and lowers emotional stress, making it a great tool for holiday-season transitions or end-of-day fatigue.
3. Bilateral Doodling
Bilateral doodling activates both hemispheres of the brain, boosts concentration, and quickly reduces anxiety. Moreover, it allows students to soothe their nervous system without needing verbal processing. Simple application:
Give students a blank sheet and two colored markers.
In addition, ask them to draw lines, curves, or free-form patterns with both hands at the same time for 45–60 seconds.
💡 This technique is especially helpful before assessments or tasks that require sustained focus—common in December as schools wrap up units before the holiday season break.
❄️ Quick Routines You Can Implement Tomorrow this Holiday Season
Here are simple, low-effort strategies with high impact:
Emotional thermometer: students show how they feel using a color or gesture at the start of class.
20–20 Pause: every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to stretch, breathe, or change posture.
Mini goal of the day: invite students to set one small, achievable intention for the session.
30-second closing: ask, “What helped you stay focused today?”
Together, these routines create predictability, reduce anxiety, and build students’ confidence in their own learning process.
By helping students navigate emotions with care and intention, we not only support their academic success—we also empower them to believe in themselves. Whether it’s through a mindful pause or a playful game, small moments of regulation can spark big breakthroughs during the holiday season and beyond.
👋 New to Legends of Learning? Sign up today and bring your classroom into a library of 2,000+ science and math games built for engagement, exploration, and achievement.
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