Thanksgiving is all about eating delicious fall foods and spending time with people you love or, if you’re a teacher, spending time with your class. Here are some ideas and lesson plans that will help your students to show gratitude in novel and rewarding ways on Thanksgiving and all throughout the year.
Thankful Pumpkin Craft
A handprint turkey is probably the most quintessential example of kids’ thanksgiving crafts. Typically the students make a paint print of their hands and write something that they’re thankful for on each of the feathers (fingers). This thankful pumpkin craft is a spinoff of the classic turkey craft that is 3D and lets the students give thanks for three extra things.
Cut a piece of orange construction paper into eight 1-inch strips. From green construction paper, cut out two leaves and two skinny strips to make vines. Curl the “vines” up around your fingers and have the students write their name on one of their two leaves. On each orange strip have the students write down one thing that they are thankful for. Staple the orange strips together at the top and bottom so they form a pumpkin. Staple the leaves and vines onto the top of the pumpkin and voila!
Cooking Stations
Thanksgiving is a beautiful thing because it combines the two best things in the world: appreciation for all the things and people you love, and the gluttonous consumption of all the foods you love. It makes sense that the best Thanksgiving projects should combine both. Have students work in small groups at cooking stations to follow recipes for a Thanksgiving lunch. Students will work together and put effort into making food to share with their classmates, and they’ll understand the effort put into their classmate’s dishes as well.
Autographed Tablecloth
During Thanksgiving lunch, while enjoying the fruits of everyone’s labor, have the students doodle and write out what they’re thankful for on the tablecloth. Later on the tablecloth can be hung up like a mural for students to see what everyone else wrote. If you’ve got the storage space and a cooperative teaching team, it can even be passed on to the teacher of the next grade, so that next year the students can compare and reflect on what they were thankful for the year before.
Warm, Fuzzy Feelings Buckets
Start by giving every student a tiny bucket with their name on it. Chose a central classroom location and place a basket of fall-colored pom-poms there. Explain to students that the pom-poms represent their “warm, fuzzy feelings of thanks.” When students feel gratitude towards a classmate for something that they’ve done they can add a pom-pom to the students bucket. This activity is awesome because it helps students to show thankfulness and also encourages them to act in ways that demonstrate respect and helpfulness.
Even better, this activity can be expanded beyond your Thanksgiving lesson plans and used all year as a reward system wherein the teacher distributes the pom-poms and the students receive a reward, like stickers or pencils, when their bucket is filled with feelings.
Krista Wolfe
Quill.com Contributing Writer
Krista Wolfe is a marketing project manager for Quill.com where she writes to help small businesses, teachers and healthcare professionals make more informed decisions on office essentials. She also writes on our new community blog, Café Quill, about a wide range of business matters such as leadership, productivity and work-life balancing. Krista lives in Chicago and you can find her on Google+ or LinkedIN.