Next week is Thanksgiving in the U.S. and many educators are looking for resources and activities to engage students.
We wanted to share a few great Thanksgiving activities and resources we found in the Edmodo Communities:
- Lisa Siegfried, 7th & 8th Grade Language Arts teacher, shared the following activity:
“We do a Thanksgiving project where students write down three negative things in their lives that they are thankful for, and then turn them into positives. (I am thankful for a messy house. Because that means I have a family at home.) They then write each sentence on a smallish poster, and then drop them on the floor one by one. (They will each have 6 to drop.) We do this with the entire 8th grade, and the last day before break, I play a playlist of appropriate music while they walk across the gym to the middle to drop their posters on the floor. I do mine first. When the last student is finished, I take a mic and tell the audience that the papers on the floor represent all the many burdens that we think we have that are actually blessings. It is a really neat program.”
- Amanda Henry, Middle School teacher at Warm Springs Middle School has shared her Edmodo folder full of Thanksgiving resources.
- Elizabeth Mangione, a teacher at Our Lady of Victory, has shared an interesting activity from the New York Times Learning blog entitled What really happened? Comparing stories of the first day of Thanksgiving.
- Lastly, here’s a great thread from the Language Arts Community with additional ideas.
If you have any you’d like to share, visit one of the Edmodo Communities and post yours!
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I had my 6th graders create a Cinquain in Pages. They then went to Voki.com and created an avatar to read that poem. My theme was Thankful For or Thanksgiving. They posted the URL onto their pages doc. Next week we will got to G Docs and upload it.
This week we are sharing an activity from “Maggie’s Treasure Trove” titled, “Wild About Turkeys” available at the primary and intermediate levels. Students will read an article about wild turkeys. They will use the facts in the article to solve a puzzle about turkeys. Ideas for making turkey bulletin boards are detailed in the Dear Colleague letter
My 6th graders made paper bag turkeys and then determined what the ratio of the body was to the head. Finally, we had a beauty contest. The boys wanted to include a talent contest (ie. sending them soaring). I nixed that idea.
My 7th graders are writing notes to their family about what they are thankful for…notes shaped like feathers and attaching to a turkey body.
I linked weekly sales flyers from 3 local grocery stores to an edmodo post, and I am having my third grade students plan a Thanksgiving meal for 10 people. They will find the estimated cost and hopefully be able to see which store had the best deals! In addition, I hope they will appreciate the cost of such a feast and not take it for granted.
I teach French. We make “Verb Turkeys” — like a “hand turkey” but with 6 feathers. Students draw a verb from a bag, write it at the bottom of the page…..then conjugate it, one form on each feather. Then, they decorate the turkey (without obscuring the conjugated verb forms) to show what the verb MEANS: example: jouer au base-ball, the turkey is wearing a baseball cap and has a bat and ball.
We post these in the hall, and they are much admired.
A good review of all the verb conjugations, in whatever tense you want to review.
The link to the NYTimes page under the Elizabeth Mangione post does not work. Can anyone help?
Good catch! I just fixed the link. Thanks for letting us know.
I teach K-5 Computer Applications. My second grade students love to write! This year we made acrostic poems using the word “Thankful”. They really enjoyed it. I use acrostic poems often.
My students watched a video in the target language that explain how Thanksgiving came about. Then I transition them to a worksheet of a turkey. On the chest of the turkey they had to write what they were grateful for.
Estoy agradecido (a) por…then on the side of the turkey they had to complete the sentence ej: Estoy agradecido por tener una familia grande y llena de alegria. Then on the feathers: write one word for all they are grateful for.
ej: la salud, familia, la educacion etc. Then they colored it and I displayed them in the classroom.
My students are using Edmodo to interact with each other while on Thanksgiving break, and they are also playing apps that I purchased from the Edmodo app store. It’s really nice to see the level of interaction that takes place online while they are away from school.
I found on twitter a link to an awesome Thanksgiving Day Parade activity for students. I did not try it this year, but will look into it for the next year. http://www.yummymath.com/2012/macys-thanksgiving-day-parade/
My third graders engaged in a novel study of Thanksgiving on Thursday. We used Brainpop to view a video on Pilgrims and toured the Mayflower via Scholastic.com.