Just to catch everyone up on our Thanksgiving unit last week:
We used the Scholastic First Thanksgiving Virtual Field trip to learn about the Wompanoag Native American tribe that made friends with the Pilgrims and helped them survive the winter. We compared the Pilgrims Daily life to the Wompanoags Daily Life. The comparisons included food, houses, clothing, chores, and games. We also created pilgrim hats and turned them into headbands that we wore out to the buses.
During math we’ve been learning about shapes and how to design patterns. We created a native american head and shirt. Then we used real pattern block to practice making our own design for the shirts. Then we used paper pattern blocks that we glued to decorate the Wompanoag’s shirt. Last we counted how many of each pattern block we used and wrote it on the recording sheet. You can find a FREE COPY of this activity here.
As we finished up our Thanksgiving activities last week, we read some more books about the first Thanksgiving and learned more about Native Americans and Pilgrims. For math we’ve been learning about 2D and 3D shapes, and how to make bigger shapes from smaller shapes. We made Native Americans designs from pattern block shapes.
During poetry time, we read the poem Five Little Turkeys using retelling cards and turkey pictures. Then students filled in missing words using number word sight word knowledge. The Five Little Turkeys book and cards came from Kindergarten Fever’s TpT.
Today we learned about the first Thanksgiving by reading The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving by Ann McGovern, and we retold the first thanksgiving by putting pictures back into the correct order. The First Thanksgiving Sequence activity can be found here.
We also finished up our discussion on nutrition and read the emergent reader book called Thanksgiving – “I Like” Series. Students partner read the story and completed the extra page at the end. Finally we made toilet paper roll turkeys with colored tissue paper and paper plates as the backing.
Last week we finished up a fun unit full of Thanksgiving activities. For our word work we created a flip book with repetitive sight words and things that you do on Thanksgiving.
We also read Thanksgiving books on things that we like. Then students used their knowledge of sight words to write sentences using the word ‘we’.
For math we read the story “The Great Turkey Race” discussed the problem and solution of the story. Then we created our own math story problems using addition and pictures of turkeys for the visual.
Finally we learned about the life of Pilgrims and Wampanoags on Scholastic.com’s First Thanksgiving website. Students made designs on Wampanoags using pattern block cutouts.
We’ve been learning about the first Thanksgiving, Pilgrims, and the Wampanoags. During our read aloud time, we read the story The Very First Thanksgiving Day and discussed key details of the story.
Then during our math workshop we reviewed our shapes and learned how to make designs with our patterns blocks, made Wampanoag faces and bodies with paper pattern block designs on their bodies.
As we continue with our First Thanksgiving Unit in Social Studies, we went back to Scholastic’s First Thanksgiving and took a virtual tour of a Pilgrim village and a Wampanoag homesite. There we learned about the daily life of both groups of people and created venn diagrams to compare and contrast the life of the Wampanoag’s and the Pilgrims.
