Thanksgiving Day

The third goal of Peace Corps is to promote a better understanding of Americans and our culture to the people of our adopted country, the Philippines.  With this in mind, and just because I wanted to do something "homey" and fun for the holidays, I ended up teaching a lesson about Thanksgiving to my grade 5 kids.  They loved it!  I started with a "History of Thanksgiving" PowerPoint (that I forgot to add pictures to, duh) and the kids did a great job following along with a fill-in-the-blank type worksheet.  We talked about the Pilgrims and the Indians and I told them the simplest version of the story, while leaving out all the controversy, of the first Thanksgiving.  

Then we looked at a "Thanksgiving Traditions" PowerPoint which I loaded with my own family pictures and pictures of Thanksgiving food that are making me hungry even now as I think about them.  I told them about our "Turkey Bowl" (Dad, you were the star of these slides!), the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, our annual family picture taking, the football watching, and of course... the food!  By the end of the slideshow all the kids were crowded around me to get a better look as I held my little laptop for all to see.

Even though, as an art educator, I'm not the biggest fan of hand turkeys, we still made them at the end of class!  The kids also wrote things they're thankful for around the outside.  One of the kids, Roy, showed me his work when he was finished and I was surprised to see that he was thankful for his "boyfriend" and "Skype".  We have a problem with copying the examples in my class...

I was able to take 2 ok lang pictures of the kids before my camera died:

Kenth Lloyd

Cathy

Cathy came to school the following day and was excited to tell me that she saw the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and all the balloons on the news!  I love classroom/real life connections!!