How to Teach Kids About Thanksgiving

Elementary-level students may be more likely to understand information through storytelling and creativity. Some helpful activities include:

• Thankfulness crafts: Teach students thankfulness through crafts like “thankfulness turkeys,” which require the child to create a turkey with colored paper for each body part and label each with something they're grateful for. Another option is thankful placemats. Students can cut pictures out of a magazine that represents what they're thankful for, glue them to a placemat and use markers to describe why each is important.
• Storytelling: Children may better understand the concept of Thanksgiving through storybooks like “We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga" by Traci Sorell. This book introduces Native American culture and the importance of gratefulness. “1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving” is another book that addresses myths and gives accurate descriptions of history.
• Food drive: You can teach students about Thanksgiving by creating a program to collect food for those in need. Students can make posters to raise awareness and decorate the cardboard boxes. Allow students to take responsibility by placing these posters and boxes around the school, checking them daily and creating evenly distributed bags of food for families.

Thanksgiving in Middle School

In middle school, children may engage in critical thinking and reasoning better, allowing them to pursue more challenging and insightful tasks like:

• Virtual or real-life field trips: Take your students on real-life or virtual field trips that help them learn about pilgrims, the Mayflower and the indigenous Wampanoag Nation people. This can give them a better perspective on Thanksgiving.
• Thanksgiving kindness chain: Give students a creative way to brainstorm Thanksgiving by jotting down the meaning of the holiday, why it's important to spread kindness and how they can do so on strips of paper to display in the classroom as a reminder throughout November.

Thanksgiving in High School

You may give your high school students more complex and thought-provoking activities to accurately understand Thanksgiving history and continue practicing gratitude.

• Thanksgiving creative writing: Encourage students to write a story about Thanksgiving using the theme options you provide. For example, you might have them choose characters like turkeys, pilgrims or Native Americans and a theme of gratitude, redemption or power. After students write their story, they can share it with a group or read it to the class.
• Thanksgiving podcast: Play a Thanksgiving history video for your students in class and have them take notes to make their own podcasts on their understanding of different perspectives. Students may then share their episodes with peers to give feedback and discuss where they were historically accurate.
• Gratitude challenge: A classroom gratitude challenge allows students to practice social-emotional learning by reflecting on things to be grateful for. Give students prompts like, “Who is someone you're grateful for at school?” “What's something you own that you're thankful for?” and “What challenging life experience are you appreciative of?” After writing their answers on Post-it notes, students can stick their favorite statements onto a turkey outline with the rest of the class.

Thanksgiving Lesson Plan Ideas

If you're still figuring out how to arrange class lessons to integrate teaching kids about Thanksgiving, here's a Thanksgiving lesson plan template you can tailor to the grade you teach.

• Begin the class by displaying an image of the Thanksgiving feast and ask students questions about what comes to mind when they see it and what they know about its history.
• Challenge students' viewpoints with other perspectives of the same story and encourage a debate. 
• Hand out papers of your Thanksgiving lesson containing important aspects of the story or a summary of a Thanksgiving book. Briefly read through it and ask them questions based on the text lesson to have a class discussion.
• Pass out worksheets for students to answer questions based on the lesson. Once students have completed the worksheets, review and discuss the correct answers.
• Transition to a chosen Thanksgiving activity suitable for your grade and have students work in groups.

Teach Students About Thanksgiving With Student Planners From Success by Design

You may be able to ensure students stay on track with their Thanksgiving lesson progress with character-building student planners. Success by Design is a company that develops high-quality character-building content in student planners to help learners effectively organize and plan class content.

Our character-building student planner has a reading time log to record minutes in Thanksgiving lessons and keep track of books. It also includes monthly calendar themes to emphasize valuable characteristics like empathy, responsibility, gratitude, creativity and more. 

To help students stay organized across subjects and learning topics, browse our range of student planners and contact our friendly team today.