Thankfulness

Is it just me, or is this school year just FLYING by?! It seems like Halloween was just yesterday and now it's Thanksgiving time! The past few months have been busy and stressful and fun and exciting, and I have so much to be thankful for!

We've had a great time in 2nd grade learning about Thanksgiving. We read all about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, and even took a virtual field trip to a Wompanoag home-site! (Side note: This was the second virtual field trip we have done, and my kids just LOVE it! It is so neat to use technology to be able to show my kids things they may have never seen otherwise! Our first virtual field trip was to see artwork in a New York City subway station after we read Jamaica Louise James. So cool!)

We also did all kinds of projects:

At the beginning of November, I sent home blank feather templates for a class turkey and told my kiddos to decorate it however they wanted and bring it back. I just love how our turkey turned out! It shows off how unique each of my students are, and it is beautiful! We also made the little pilgrims at the top using paper plates and some construction paper cut outs. Last Monday, a pilgrim came to our school and talked to all of the second grade classes. She was awesome, and since then my kids have been really interested in learning about the Pilgrims. 

Another project that we made was a turkey glyph. The kids had to answer a series of questions about how they celebrate Thanksgiving to create their turkey, and they turned out so well! (I forgot to take a picture of them all hung up, but here is one of them!)

 

 On Monday, we had a Friendship Feast for snack and math. My students brought in food items to put in our snack mix, and they all helped me put the mix together. Each item represented something from the first Thanksgiving. For example, the marshmallows represented the snow and bad weather the pilgrims endured their first winter in America, pretzel sticks represented the logs the Pilgrims made their houses out of, goldfish represented how Squanto taught the pilgrims to plant corn using two rotten fish, etc. After we made our Friendship Feast mix, each student got a plate and had to count and graph each item as they ate. At the end, they answered a series of questions about their graph. My favorite question was "If you could add any snack to our mix, what would you add and what would it represent?" My kiddos are so darn creative, and what a fun way to use those higher order thinking skills than with food! They did a great job.

 

  I read the book The Most Thankful Thing by Lisa McCourt (which is really cute!) and then we made our own books of Thankful Things. Each student had to write about 5 things that they are thankful for and draw a picture. These turned out sooo cute!

 

And apparently, a lot of my kiddos are thankful for me, which is so very sweet! In addition to their sweet writing, I loved their different artistic renditions of me ;) 

On Tuesday, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a Read-In Pajama Party and a feast for lunch, complete with pizza, cornbread muffins, fruit salad, veggies, pumpkin pie, and all kinds of other goodies. The parents in my class are awesome and so generously donated to us so much food that we did not even open all of it and I had to send it back home with them!

 

 It was a lot of fun to study and celebrate Thanksgiving with my second graders! I'm so thankful for the 20 kiddos that I get to teach this year, along with so many other things. How did you celebrate Thanksgiving?