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Santa Bruce Activities and Lesson Plans for 2024

Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for Santa Bruce will find this post helpful. It includes resource recommendations, free teaching ideas, and information about the book. You’ll have everything you need to deliver engaging interactive read aloud lessons based on this story.

With themes of advocation and problem solving, this Santa Bruce picture book by Ryan Higgins is a favorite in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. It will be a big hit in your classroom too! Learn more about this book below!

Engage Your Students with Santa Bruce Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:

  1. Read a summary of Santa Bruce. You can find it in the section below.
  2. Check out the teaching ideas for reading comprehension strategies, grammar topics and social emotional learning skills that can be taught using this children’s book.
  3. Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with Santa Bruce reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.

SANTA BRUCE SUMMARY

Santa Bruce is the hilarious story about a bear with a mistaken identity. Bruce the bear, does not like winter or the holidays. He wants to stay inside and sleep but his family wants to celebrate Christmas. When Bruce is outside with his long underwear and hat, a raccoon mistakes him for Santa! Within no time, all the critters in the forest are at Bruce’s house wanting to sit on Santa’s lap. The mice in Bruce’s house even promise that Bruce will deliver presents to everyone. Despite all his protests, Bruce is stuck acting as Santa and must give out presents all around town.

Students will laugh out loud during this fun Christmas read aloud about a bear that doesn’t like Christmas.

SANTA BRUCE LESSON PLAN IDEAS

Each of our 600+ Starts With a Story book companions come with a teacher’s guide to make lesson planning quick and easy, printable worksheets and digital resources that cover ALL of the standards-based reading comprehension skills.

When it comes to writing lesson plans and finding activities for Santa Bruce, we’ve already done all of the heavy lifting for you.

We found this book was especially good at teaching the topics listed below.

READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

The text-based Santa Bruce reading comprehension questions focus on:

  • making inferences
  • making predictions
  • analyzing setting
  • analyzing illustrations
  • point of view
  • plot (problem-solution)
  • cause and effect

LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS

We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:

  • advocation
  • problem solving

GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY

  • prefixes
  • suffixes
  • punctuation
  • onomatopoeia

SANTA BRUCE ACTIVITIES

You’ll receive all of the following resources aligned to the story:

  • comprehension questions
  • 30 writing prompts with themed paper
  • vocabulary activities
  • word study print & go activities
  • ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
  • social emotional learning discussion topics
  • graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
Santa Bruce activity
elementary teacher reading aloud a picture book to her students

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Santa Bruce activity

BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS

What are the reading levels for Santa Bruce?

  • Lexile® Measure: AD530L
  • Guided Reading Level: M
  • DRA Level: 20
  • Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 2.4

Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?

The book was written and illustrated by Ryan Higgins.

What genre is Santa Bruce?

It is a fiction book. You may want to check out our genre activities or read our blog post, How to Teach Genre to Elementary Students.

How many pages are in the book?

The story is 48 pages long.

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