Check Out the Thanksgiving-themed Writing Lesson on WordWriter Last month BoomWriter published a Halloween writing lesson that you could have conducted through their free WordWriter service. This month BoomWriter is offering a similar lesson plan with a Thanksgiving theme. The lesson plan that is appropriate for students in grades three through eight. WordWriter allows you to create vocabulary lists that you want your students to incorporate into a writing assignment. If you haven't tried BoomWriter or WordWriter before, check out my demonstration videos embedded below. Disclosure: BoomWriter is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com
How Thanksgiving Works - HowStuffWorks Have you ever wondered why Americans gather around the table each year and prepare to eat food regarded as traditional, but rarely assembled as a meal the rest of the year? Turkey, gravy, corn, stuffing, cranberries and pies take center stage on Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving also stands out from other American holidays in the sense that it isn't tied to any specific religion, and you can pretty much celebrate it however you want. The only essential traditions are to enjoy a meal with friends or family and to give thanks for what you have. In the pantheon of holidays, Thanksgiving is about as simple as it gets. The holiday also honors American history, of course. Have you ever wondered where the particulars of this story and the other details of Thanksgiving actually come from?
Thanksgiving Lessons for Grades 6-8 Directions Voyage on the Mayflower: 5 Lessons Preparation Before discussing the voyage of the Mayflower, hand out the KWL graphic organizer and have students fill in any information they know about the ship, its voyage, and its crew and passengers. Then ask volunteers to share their knowledge with the class. Invite students to explore the Voyage on the Mayflower, including Tour the Ship and the Pilgrim timeline. To learn more about the travelers' experiences during the voyage, have students search and refer to additional online resources, as well as books in your class library (here is one list of recommended books). Lesson One: Of Plymouth Plantation Close Read Have students read excerpts from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, a primary source text about the first Thanksgiving. For the first reading, have students read portions of the text that have to do with the Pilgrims lives in Europe and setting sail for America. Lesson Two: Notices and Wonders Lesson Three: Research Component
The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving Thanksgiving is coming-up in a few weeks, so I thought another “The Best…” list was in order (you might also be interested in The Best Resources On “Gratitude”). As with The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus, many of the online resources accessible to English Language Learners tell the usual and uncritical story of Europeans and Native Americans. So the first part of this post those accessible links, while the second part lists online resources that I’ve found helpful to me in developing classroom lessons that try to demonstrate a Native American perspective. Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving (not in a strict order of preference, but with the ones I think that are most accessible listed near the top): Brainpop and Brainpop Jr. have two good Thanksgiving movies that provide closed-captioning. Scholastic has a good feature on The First Thanksgiving that provides audio support to the text and is very engaging. How Thanksgiving Works.
What they didn't teach you about the first Thanksgiving in school The story of the first Thanksgiving, as told to American children, goes something like this: When the Pilgrims first made it to Plymouth Rock, they suffered through a desperate winter and had great difficulty surviving. But eventually, and with the help of Squanto the friendly Indian, they learned how to grow food. Finally, despite mistrust on both sides, the Pilgrims and Indians ended up making peace and eventually sharing a feast together, which we commemorate today on Thanksgiving. This story isn't exactly inaccurate. But it omits several key details that are crucial to understanding why this truce between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag confederation was reached — details of both dreadful tragedy and political scheming. 1) It wasn't just the Pilgrims who were weak — the Wampanoag had recently been decimated by disease A 1754 depiction of Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, visiting the Plymouth Colony. A statue of Massasoit overlooks Plymouth Harbor in 2013.