Thanksgiving Activities for Your Classroom
Thanksgiving is a time for friends and family to come together and reflect on all that for which we are grateful. As a teacher, you can bring that spirit of Thanksgiving into your classroom. Here are six Thanksgiving activities to help make this time of year exciting and thought-provoking for your students.
1. Make Turkey Pumpkins
If you have any leftover pumpkins that didn’t get carved for Halloween, consider making them into turkeys! Simply use the pumpkin as the body and attach turkey feathers and a head. This is a fun way of transitioning from one holiday to the next. Check out this how-to guide.
3. Have a Traditional Potluck
The first Thanksgiving dinner looked quite different from what we tend to consider the traditional meal today. Find out which foods they ate at the first Thanksgiving and have your students bring in different dishes for a potluck. You could even encourage them to bring in holiday dishes that are traditional in their family.
4. Take Your Students on a Virtual Fieldtrip
Scholastic has a really cool website where you can explore the history of the first Thanksgiving and take a virtual fieldtrip to the Mayflower, the Wampanoag homesite, Plimoth Plantation, and more. There are other really fun educational activities as well.
5. Participate in a Community Service Project
Helping others and giving back to the community is often one of the best ways to celebrate the holidays. It can also be a good reminder of what we have to be grateful for. Find a worthy cause in your neck of the woods and see how your class can help provide service.
6. Read Wampanoag Folktales
Teach your students more about the Native American tribe that helped the pilgrims to properly grow food. Check out these Wampanoag folktales from Education World.
What Thanksgiving activities do you enjoy doing with your students?
What are their favorite Thanksgiving activities? How do you keep them engaged and learning during the holiday season? Let us know in the comments below.
Also be sure to check out this article for more ideas on Thanksgiving activities.
Then, you may want to explore apps for more upcoming holidays here.
About the Author
Carolina Fransen is the EdTech Apps and Tools Editor at SimpleK12.com. She writes regularly about the use of educational technology in K-12 classrooms. She also loves investigating teaching jobs in some of her favorite locales. If you have an app, tool, website, or service that you think we should know about, please send your information or tip to editor@simplek12.com.
You are so creative and clever with all your unit plans. I am no longer a classroom teacher (retired in 2014) but find I can use a lot of your materials as I work with my students in RTI. Thank you for your fabulous work and for sharing.