Come and Join Us!: 4th Graders Trouble the “Holiday Season”
By Vanessa Williams
Within three minutes of entering Georgetown Day School, I noticed prospective students and their families were visiting the campus for the day. Then I ran into local historian and scholar Pat Scallen — who’s an advisor for Teach Central America and has penned lessons and stories for it — and I was warmly welcomed by Julia Tomasko, current teacher and alum of the school. While she might not have literally uttered “Come and join us” when we made our way up to her classroom, the spirit of that phrase was palpable and at the center of this school visit that day.
In November of 2022, the upper elementary — of which Tomasko is a member — and secondary working groups met jointly at Bruce-Monroe at Parkview to trouble the practice of designating the early winter months as the “holiday season” in K-12 schools. The groups kicked off this meeting with people’s history trivia on holidays, did a circle share on how they experienced holidays in their classrooms growing up, and how they’ve navigated them as teachers themselves. Then they co-created curricular resources to engage students in a variety of activities, a senses graphic organizer, and activism to recognize or observe more holidays on school and district calendars. (If you’re reading this story and want to come and join us, you’re encouraged to complete our working group application!)
Tomasko and her fourth-grade class, the Commanders, adapted these resources during their mini-unit study after the winter break. Tomasko and her warm crew invited me to participate in their learning, and I joined them for the second half of their read aloud of local educator and writer Liz Kleinrock’s picture book Come and Join Us! 18 Holidays Celebrated All Year Long. During their class reading, students reflected on, stopped and jotted, or turned and talked about:
The values associated with different holidays and how people practice them
How objects symbolize important ideas
What holidays are important to them and their families and why
After reading the book, Tomasko gave students directions about the choice centers from which they were going to select. To help process their learning, they could choose to revise a document they worked on when they launched this mini-unit, chart when the holiday season is on a bar graph, read the author’s note and then write to Kleinrock herself, or choose one of the 18 holidays to learn more about, then share their learning on a mini-poster or in their composition books.
While I only joined their class for a glimpse of this study, it was clear that all of the students were thoughtfully engaging with and challenging a long held and woefully misguided assumption. In advocating for a calendar that does not just uplift religious holidays of the Christian tradition, won’t you join them?