As we talked about the history of Thanksgiving and learned about how we celebrate Thanksgiving in our different families, we read a story called The Most Thankful Thing. We talked about what it means to be thankful and then brainstormed all the things we have to be thankful for. The Native American morning message book called Giving Thanks also helped us to remember what a beautiful world we have and how trees, water, plants, animals, and even walking barefoot in the grass, are blessings to be thankful for. As we discussed how we are thankful for good food, we talked about how some people do not have enough good food to eat and we came up with the idea to collect items for a food bank. The children were excited every day to find out the new the total of number of items donated. To help get out the word to the school the children made posters to put up and talked to other classes to try to help them remember to bring donations. This is a picture of Maya and Maddie working on their “advertising.”

We had a great time preparing for our Thanksgiving Feast! We came up with a list of what we might want to serve our parents. Most of the things they chose, we were able to make- sorry, no turkey! The first step was to take our trip to the grocery store to buy the food.

Here are some photos of our shopping trip.

 

We enlisted the help of our eighth grade buddies to help us do the cooking.

The children had learned four songs to sing for our feast and did a great job. They also made turkey hats to wear. The pumpkins they made in art made beautiful centerpieces.

Thanks to all the parents for coming out to support these amazing children!

 

Now that we finished our unit on Thanksgiving we are diving into our new unit about Tales and Rhymes. We will be exploring fairy tales, folk tales, nursery rhymes, and Hanukkah tales. Mid- January our culminating activity for this unit will be doing mini-plays and having a character day where the children dress up as their favorite character in a story or rhyme. I will be sending out a date for that at a later time.

The children are working hard to get ready for Portfolio Day and we look forward to showing some things they have been working on.

It warms my heart as I see these lovely children be helpful and kind in our classroom. What a wonderful class!