What This Skill Does
Produces a set of seasonal or holiday materials built for a specific classroom: one informational text covering several traditions, two differentiated versions, and aligned assessment with an extension that connects back to students' own lives.
The gap it fills is narrow and real. Seasonal resources are everywhere; ones that match a particular room's cultural backgrounds, reading levels, and standards are not.
When To Use This
A teacher needs material for a holiday, season, or time of year — end of October, winter celebrations, Lunar New Year, spring festivals, end-of-year reflection — and wants it to reflect the students actually in front of them.
Ask For This First
- Grade level and subject
- The occasion and how much class time it gets
- Who the students are — cultural backgrounds, home languages, the traditions actually present in the room
- Reading levels — the target level and the range above and below
- Curriculum standards to align to
- Anything off-limits — school or district policy on holidays, or families who opt out
Ask which traditions are present rather than inferring from a location or a set of names. Getting this wrong is the whole risk of the task.
If a curriculum knowledge base is available for their standards, or a multilingual-learner framework for their language supports, use it rather than recalling from memory.
The Workflow
Stage 1 — The base text
Write an informational text at the target reading level covering several traditions connected to this time of year — including ones present in this classroom, and Indigenous traditions of the land the school is on where the teacher has named them. Align to the standards given. Build in supports for multilingual learners as you write, rather than bolting them on.
Treat each tradition on its own terms. No tradition is the default that others are compared against.
Stage 2 — Differentiate
Produce two more versions:
- Below grade level — simplified vocabulary, shorter sentences, more concrete description, in-line definitions, sentence frames, and cognates for the specific languages the teacher named
- Above grade level — deeper cultural and historical analysis, more complex sentence structure, more room for interpretation
Same content and same respect in all three. A student on the simplified version should not get a thinner or more stereotyped account.
Stage 3 — Assessment and extension
- Comprehension questions aligned to the standards, progressing from literal recall through inference to cultural analysis
- Vocabulary support — academic language plus the content and cultural terms in the text
- An extension where students research a tradition of their own, or interview a family member about it
If image generation is available in the conversation, offer to create illustrations for the text — and describe what you intend to depict before generating, so the teacher can catch a misrepresentation before students see it.
Guardrails
- Ask; do not assume. Which traditions are in the room comes from the teacher, never from a place name, a demographic guess, or a student's name.
- Describe a tradition as its practitioners describe it. Name variation within a tradition rather than flattening it into one account. "Many families…" not "They…".
- Do not exoticize. No customs framed as strange, quaint, or fascinating; no tradition treated as a curiosity beside an unmarked norm.
- Do not collapse distinct traditions. Día de los Muertos, Halloween, Samhain, and Diwali are not variations on one theme, and saying so is the most common failure in seasonal resources.
- Indigenous content carries a higher bar. Name the specific nation rather than a generic label, use present tense — these are living peoples, not history — and tell the teacher to verify with tribal education resources or Indigenous educators before teaching it.
- Design the family extension for every student. A student in foster care, recently arrived, or estranged from family must have an equally good option. Always offer a research alternative alongside the interview.
- Flag what you are unsure of. Say plainly which claims should be checked with a community source, and never present a contested account as settled.
Where This Came From
Adapted from the TeamTeacher guide Culturally Responsive Seasonal Content: Three Prompts — https://www.teamteacher.ai/docs/guides/seasonal-content-three-prompts