It’s beginning to look a lot like winter…
This workbook we decided not to look at one country, but lots of countries! And instead of just looking at Christmas, we decided to look at winter and all the fun things we can do.
If you’re from the UK, winter is a time when it’s cold, maybe wet - sometimes it even snows! But it’s not like that everywhere in the world. In some countries, December is one of the hottest months of the year!
Keep that in mind when we’re learning about winter around the world!
This workbook is all about the history, stories, languages and food of winter, in lots of different countries around the world - let’s go!
This workbook has 7 different activities.
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Before you start…
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When you’ve printed out the worksheets and got a pen or pencil, then scroll down to the begin the activities.
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Activity 1: Christmas Foods
Christmas is celebrated in lots of different countries around the world. Even people who aren’t Christians will celebrate Christmas by having a delicious family dinner.
But the meals that people eat for Christmas around the world are quite different. In the UK lots of people have roast turkey for Christmas - it’s called a traditional Christmas dinner (although not everyone in the UK eats turkey for Christmas).
But what about what people in other countries eat for Christmas dinner? Can you complete this quiz and figure out which Christmas food is eaten in which country?
There’s a space on page 3 of your workbooks to circle the right answers. You’ll find a star next to one of the answers, that’s the answer that goes in the Answer Grid ⭐
Photo by Monstera by Pexel
Did you know?
Although it’s common to eat turkey for Christmas dinner in the UK, it used to be normal to eat goose instead. Turkeys originally came from the Americas, and were only brought to the UK in the 1500s.
Gradually people started eating turkey instead, because it can feed more people.
Activity 2: Snow animals
Snowy, icy or cold places can be difficult to live in for humans. However, lots of animals can live in the snow, as they have thick coats or layers of fat to keep them warm.
Many animals that live in the snow look white, like polar bears. This is for camouflage, so they can better hunt, or hide from hunters.
Here are just a few of the animals that live in or around the snow...
wolverine; snow leopard; polar bear; snow goose
musk ox; dall’s sheep; penguin; walrus
Take a look at pages 4 & 5 on your worksheets. There are some multiple choice questions about different animals that live in the snow. Pick the correct answer and then write the answer letter in the box.
At the end it should spell out the name of an animal. That animal is the word that goes in the Answer Grid. ⭐
Activity 3: Winter celebrations
Christmas isn’t the only celebration that happens in winter, although sometimes it can seem like it. Different religions and countries have different celebrations, which happen at different dates. Here are some famous ones with a little explanation.
Hanukkah
Hanukkah is a festival of lights for Jewish people. Jewish people live all over the world, so Hanukkah is celebrated in lots of different countries. Hanukkah means ‘dedication’ and is about light over darkness, and miracles. Some people think that it’s the same as Christmas, because lots of people give gifts at Hanukkah, but actually it’s quite different.
Epiphany
Epiphany is a Christian holiday which is different to Christmas. It celebrates when the Magi (Kings) followed a star in the sky to find the baby Jesus. In some countries people gift presents and have parades and festivals.
Winter Solstice
People have celebrated the Winter Solstice (and the Summer Solstice) for thousands of years. It was an easy way to tell when winter was halfway through, before people had clocks and calendars. Some people prefer to celebrate Winter Solstice instead of Christmas, as it is older and not Christian.
St Lucy’s Day
Also called St. Lucia, this celebration is named after a woman from the 6th century, called Lucia, who brought food to Christian people who were hiding underground. They were worried they would be killed for their beliefs and Lucy helped them. Now people celebrate with lots of candles and special snacks.
Yalda
Yalda is a celebration from the Zoroastrian religion, which is very old. It happens on the same night as Winter Solstice. In the country where Yalda is celebrated, they have a different calendar. Yalda is the last day of the month of Azar.
Sinterklaas
Sinterklaas happens before Christmas, although it is quite similar to Christmas. Children welcome the Sint and he leaves presents in their shoes overnight. There are lots of special songs to celebrate Sinterklaas coming and people eat special things like chocolate letters and pepernoten. Sinterklaas is the name of the holiday and the man.
Hogmanay
This is an important celebration after Christmas in one country. No one is quite sure where the name came from, although it might be French. There are lots of traditions around this holiday, including bringing a piece of coal to people’s houses as a present!
Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa is quite a new holiday and is popular in African countries, and for African people who live outside of Africa. Kwanzaa lasts several days and celebrates African culture and history. This is particularly important for some people, as they feel that in their new countries, they haven’t always been treated kindly.
This activity is a research activity. You’ll probably need to use a search engine like www.google.com or find an encyclopedia. If you need to ask permission from a grown up before you look things up on the internet, make sure you do!
Take a look at pages 6, 7 & 8 of the worksheets. There are some questions about different holidays that happen around December and January. Can you answer the questions? You’ll find a star somewhere along the way...⭐
Activity 4: The Winter Olympics
The Winter Olympics started in 1924 as a way to celebrate and compete in winter sports, like skiing and ice skating. It’s smaller than the summer Olympics and fewer countries compete, but it can be very exciting!
Here’s a little video about the history of the Winter Olympics - you can see some of the funny costumes people used to wear.
The Winter Olympics has some funny sports that you may not have heard of, like luge, curling, skeleton or biathlon. Here are a couple…
The Winter Olympics are held every 4 years, in a different city. However the city has to be somewhere with snow! Take a look at page 9 of your worksheets. There’s a table showing some of the Winter Olympics cities, with their dates and countries.
Can you fill in the missing information? You’ll need to do some research.
The answer that goes next to the star goes into the Answer Grid ⭐
Activity 5: Glaciers
A glacier is basically a river of ice. As it’s frozen it flows like a river, but incredibly slowly. Most glaciers only move 25cm per day.
Glaciers happen in places where more snow falls than melts. New snow falls onto old snow so the pile gets heavier and heavier. Eventually the snow on top pushes the snow at the bottom so much that it compresses into ice.
Glaciers usually happen in mountains, so the snow and ice slowly, slowly move downhill. Glaciers are heavy and carry rocks and stones with them. These can scratch the ground underneath, changing what the land looks like. Lots of valleys, especially in England and Wales, were made by glaciers in the last ice ages. All the ice has melted now.
Glacial valleys can look like this:
At the end of glaciers by the sea, icebergs can form, like at Perito Moreno glacier. The ice breaks off in big chunks called icebergs and floats away.
Some glaciers look blue because the water in them is so pure. Others can look a bit dirty, because of all the rocks and dust they carry with them.
Icebergs break off from Perito Moreno glacier
Glaciers can look blue because the water is so pure
Some glaciers look dirty but it’s just rocks and soil
Glaciers are important to the world, because they contain a lot of freshwater. As the world is heating up due to climate change, glaciers are beginning to melt, or retreat. This is a big problem for the world, for a few reasons:
The water that melts from glaciers has to go somewhere. Usually it goes into the sea, leading to sea levels getting higher and flooding the land.
Ice reflects the heat of the sun better than land does. If there’s less ice, the earth will get hotter.
Lots of animals rely on snow and ice to live, like polar bears, seals and wolves.
Glaciers exist all over the world, so let’s work out where some of these famous glaciers are…
Lambert Glacier
Perito Moreno
Margerie Glacier
Furtwängler Glacier
Vatnajökull Glacier
Fox Glacier (Te Moeka o Tuawe)
Biafo Glacier
Yulong Glacier
Jostedalsbreen Glacier
Quelccaya Ice Cap
Take a look at page 10 of your workbook - can you work out where each of these glaciers is located? You might have to do a little research.
One of them has a star - that’s the answer that goes in the Answer Grid (don’t include the word glacier!) ⭐
Activity 6: Living in the Arctic
For many people, living in the Arctic doesn’t sound like much fun. It can go down to −40° C in temperature, with strong winds (which makes it feel colder) and there are weeks and weeks where the sun doesn’t come over the horizon and it’s dark all day.
Yet, some people choose to live in the Arctic Circle. Quite a few of those people are from Indigenous groups, like the Inuit, Yupik and Aleut peoples. Indigenous peoples have lived there for a long time and developed special ways to live in the harsh environment.
In this activity we’re going to talk about the Inuit peoples, and the amazing ways they have adapted to living in a very cold place.
Inuit people live in the north of Canada and Alaska, and the west of Greenland.
In the past, non-Inuit people called them Eskimos, but not any more because it is seen as a rude word. Eskimo means ‘flesh-eater’ in another language, which isn’t a very nice thing to call someone. An Inuit person or Inuk is the right name.
Where the Inuit live it gets really cold. So cold that you could freeze to death in 1 hour if you weren’t wearing the right clothes. Not only is it cold, it can also be difficult to find food, travel, or make clothes or tools.
Let’s look at some of the ways that Inuit culture helped people survive the cold. Many Inuit people don’t live in this way anymore, although some still do.
Photos by Arthur H. Tweedle; Frank E. Kleinschmidt; Captain George E. Mack, Public domain , via Wikimedia Commons
The Inuit built specially designed houses
In the past, the Inuit were a nomadic people, which means they didn’t live in permanent houses all the time, but would move to different places through the year, building a new place to live in each place.
Inuit people mostly built igloos - houses of ice - in the winter, and lived in qarmaq or tupiq - different types of tents - when it was spring, summer or autumn.
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Igloos look like simple buildings made from blocks of ice, but they’re actually very well designed. You have to crawl through a small tunnel to get into an igloo. That means that the warm air already inside the igloo stays inside, because warm air rises. Even if it was freezing cold outside, it could be 16° C inside an igloo.
The sleeping platform was a bit higher than the floor of the igloo, so people could be even warmer when they slept.
The igloo would also have little holes in the roof to let out fumes and bad smells. The ice blocks would be very thick to protect against the wind.
In the summer, the Inuit would make tents out of the skins of seals. There is very little wood in the Arctic, so the Inuit had to find a different way to prop their tents up. Some people used whale bones, from whales they had hunted, to prop their tents up.
A qarmak was more permanent tent than a tupiq. Inuit would put big stones around the bottom to keep the wind out, and sometimes would add big lumps of dirt - called sod - to the sides for more warmth.
A tupiq tent was more portable and looks more like a regular tent, but made of seal or caribou skins.
Nowadays, some Inuit still live in traditional houses, but others live in modern, permanent houses made from wood. They have central heating and electricity to keep warm.
Travelling through the snow
Wheels don’t work very well on thick snow, so how did the Inuit travel across the land?
Drew Avery, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Inuit travel by dog sled - a sledge pulled by a group of dogs. The Inuit bred sled dogs from wolves and a few famous dog breeds, like Husky dogs were originally used by Inuit people. A single dog or teams of dogs could be used to pull heavy loads.
flickr user wili hybrid, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Inuit also needed to travel across the water. They invented a small one-man boat made from seal skins, called a qajak - nowadays we call them kayaks!
Inuit men could go out hunting or fishing in a kayak. The Inuit also had larger canoes for women and children called umiak. They were much longer and safer, and could even be used to transport dogs!
Nowadays some Inuit people still use dog sleds, but they can also use snow trucks or skidoos to travel across the snow much faster.
Eating a healthy diet in the Arctic
Everyone needs to eat a healthy diet, even in places where it’s impossible to grow vegetables. Inuit people did a lot of hunting, particularly seals, fish, walrus and even polar bears and whales! Inuit men would hunt whales from their qajaks in a group, or wait at holes in the ice for seals to come up to breathe.
The Inuit were always careful to not hunt too many animals, as they might run out. The Inuit had a strict calendar, and only hunted some animals at certain times of year.
Wiki-profile, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Without fruits and vegetables, the Inuit had to find a way to get their vitamins and minerals. In the past, Inuit people would eat the skins of whales (called muktuk) which is very high in vitamin C. Muktuk comes in chunks and is quite smelly! The Inuit also gather some plants to eat, like berries and seaweed, but only in the summer.
Nowadays some Inuit people still hunt for their food, but they can also buy tinned food.
Dressing up warm
Dressing up warm is one of the most important ways to survive in the Arctic. Traditional Inuit clothes are made from animal skins - the Inuit people would use every single part of an animal if they hunted it. Inuit women could sew using needles made from animal bones, and thread made from animal muscles.
The most famous type of Inuit clothing you’ve probably heard of. An anorak or parka is a type of coat invented by the Inuit. They often have hoods with fur lining. Inuit women would wear slightly larger parkas, so their babies could hang from their backs and stay warm.
Making tools without metal
It wasn’t really possible to make metal in the Arctic in the past. The Inuit made do mostly without metal tools. However, some groups of Inuit lived close to an amazing source of metal - a meteorite!
American Museum of Natural History, via Wikimedia Commons
The Innaanganeq Meteorite (also called Cape York meteorite) fell from space thousands of years ago. Some Inuit knew the location and would cut off chunks of it to make metal tools like harpoons and arrow heads!
In other areas, the Inuit later began to trade with Europeans, when they arrived in the Americas. The Inuit people would swap furs (which were very valuable to Europeans) for metal tools and food. However the Europeans also brought diseases with them. Many Inuit died of European diseases like tuberculosis.
Nowadays, Inuit people can buy modern tools to use.
Take a look at pages 11 & 12 of your worksheets. There are some basic illustrations that someone made of things they saw in Inuit communities. Can you label the objects, based on what you’ve read above? One of the objects has a star next to it.
That’s the answer that goes in the Answer Grid ⭐
Activity 7: The Ice Hotel
bjaglin from Lund, Sweden, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Actually, there’s not just one ice hotel, there are lots. There’s an ice hotel in Quebec, one in Romania, another in Finland and others in Sweden, Norway and Austria.
They’re exactly what they sound like - hotels made completely of ice! Every year, builders and sculptors use big blocks of ice and snow to build places for tourists to stay in.
Some hotels even have restaurants or hot tubs in them!
People who stay in an ice hotel sleep in bedrooms made from ice, on bed made from big lumps of ice, although they’re covered in furs or sleeping bags. It gets pretty cold in the rooms, but not as cold as it is outdoors!
Every year the ice hotels melt in summer and have to be rebuilt again in autumn!
Marc-Lautenbacher, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Take a look at page 13 of your worksheets. There’s an ice castle there, but some blocks of ice are missing. The shapes which are available to fit into the holes are below.
See if you can fit the blocks into the gaps in the ice. Remember, they can’t overlap! But you can turn them over.
When you’re done, write how many of each shape you used in the boxes available.
Then answer the question on the sheet with the star ⭐
Tom Corser, CC BY-SA 2.0 UK, via Wikimedia Commons
闫恩铭 / Enming Yan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Congratulations!
You’ve reached the end. You should have 7 answers now. You can write them all in the Answer Grid to reveal the vertical word.
Have you heard of this before? If not, look it up on Google and find some pictures!
Do you want to check your answer?
Click the button below and type in your answer. If you’ve got it right, you’ll get a congratulations message. If nothing happens, check your answers and try again!