How will you make Thanksgiving interesting for your older students?
Without trying to sound dismissive, planning Thanksgiving lessons for younger students is easy. Making a turkey out of a handprint or pilgrim hats and Native American headdresses out of construction paper is fun and gets elementary students into the mood of the holiday.
But what about older students, who are no longer impressed with paper headwear? There are still some great lessons revolving around Thanksgiving that are not only age-appropriate, but also interactive and historically accurate.
The Mayflower Compact
Thanksgiving is important, but equally important is why the pilgrims were here in the first place. Those ideas are captured in the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the new colony. Once you and the students do some background study of the document itself, have some student groups start drafting their own. You can even go so far as to have them use parchment paper and calligraphy, just as they did almost 400 years ago.
Revisionist history
There has been a lot written about the first Thanksgiving and the general experience of the pilgrims in the new world, some more accurate than others. It might be out of the purview of the class to analyze the fact from fiction (although it’s a lot of fun), but you can have the kids speculate about differing futures that would have happened if certain events never took place. What if the natives viewed the pilgrims as enemies from the start? What if the pilgrims had reached their intended destination of Virginia rather than what would eventually be Massachusetts?
Sell the colony
By all accounts, life for the pilgrims was miserable before the first Thanksgiving and didn’t improve much afterward, yet people from England kept coming to the new colony that would become Massachusetts. Have the students pretend it’s their job to “sell” the new colony to the people back home. They can make brochures or even a PowerPoint to talk about the positives of living in the New World.
Cultural understanding
Many countries around the world have what could be considered Thanksgiving celebrations, even though they might have nothing to do with pilgrims and natives. These holidays—in France, Great Britain, Greece, Brazil, and even China—tend to take place around harvest time, just as Thanksgiving does for us. Have the students compare and contrast these Thanksgivings with ours. You might even want to organize your class celebration to resemble one of the foreign harvest celebrations for a change of pace.