A Thanksgiving Feast with a Dash of Christmas

Normally my days seem to fly by, but this week has been moving at a snails pace.  It could be that it gets dark at 5:00 now, which makes me think it is time for bed when the evening has just begun.  Or it could be that it is getting closer to the holidays and the kids are getting antsy (which means loud, extra silly, and forgetful), which means they drive me a little bit crazy some days, making the day last an eternity!  I am guessing it is a combination of the two!  No worries, next week is a 3 day week!

In preparation for Thanksgiving, we have been studying all about the Pilgrims and Indians.  Last week I read about the chores that pilgrim children had.

The Pilgrim children definitely had more chores than the kiddos nowadays!  Read for yourself!

My students basically have to clean their rooms and make their beds.  No fetching water, milking goats, cooking meals, harvesting grain, etc.

To educate ourselves about the Indians, we did a little reading from the Social Studies books about different Indian tribes.  We also watched the slideshow of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians on the Scholastic website.  To review what we learned, the kids did some writing in their Thanksgiving Books.

"The Mayflower is the ship can hold 102 Pilgrims."

"The Pilgrims sailed to America on the Mayflower."

"The Native Americans hunted animals."

We aren't quite finished with our books yet.  I will show you the rest of the pages next week!  If you want the template for the book click here.  

The art teacher was absent this week, so I had to come up with something to do with the kiddos. Martha Stewart inspired me to make corn husk dolls, but it is near impossible to find corn husks in San Francisco, so I had to come up with something else.  Since we learned about Indians making canoes, or mishoons, out of trees, I thought it would be fun to make our own canoes for art.  Don't worry, we didn't cut down any trees.   These were paper canoes, with little Indians to row them.  Lacing the canoe helped work on their fine motor skills.  We listened to Spirit flute music while doing art which they thought was funny.  If you happen to have corn husks, maybe you can put these directions to use and make some dolls with your kids.

We also made these items during art this week!

I know it is still November, but we are only in school one week in December and I wanted to have the kids make some decorations for the school.  If we wait until December, nobody is going to see them!  For the trees, I gave the kids a tree template to cut out and then gave them odds and ends for decorations.  They loved the shiny stuff!  After they finished decorating their trees they wrote about them.  

"My tree is shiny.  My tree has a lot of ornaments.  My tree is beautiful.  My tree is green."

Their writing is really coming along.  We worked on syllables this week, so it was easier for them to sound out the longer words.  I was so proud of their writing!  It made my day, until I saw this. . .

  which was the cherry on top!  They can be a handful sometimes, but then they surprise you!