Thanksgiving Planning

Whew!

     It's already November! 

     ...which means it's almost Thanksgiving, which means it's almost Christmas, which means the school year is almost halfway over, which means soon the school year will be over!! I know that's jumping ahead a bit but I'm not convinced that I'm wrong! It seems like this year just started, but it also seems like the beginning of the year was so long ago.

    Anyways, the point of this post is to remark on a few thoughts I had while planning my month of November. Yesterday and today I had a MUCH smaller class size than normal (about 1/4 of a normal class!) so I was able to plan just about all of November! Being a first-year solo teacher, I get to decide what I want my students to learn and in which ways to learn it. This is a curse and blessing. Mainly I'm referring to the whole "First-Thanksgiving-was-or-was-not-actually-a-totally-friendly-experience-for-everyone-involved-controversy". 

     There's so many teacher resources that depict the first Thanksgiving timeline as a quaint and happy sequence of events between "Pilgrims and Indians". But we also see that in the early grades, talking about the less amiable aspects of the first Thanksgiving or even forgoing them is not the norm. As we learn in higher education, that isn't the whole story. Now my schtick is that I don't like lying to my class because that's not fair to them or even to me later when they come back and say that someone else told them something different and then it becomes me against them and not about the actual topic and whatnot. 

     So thanks to a history lesson and research on my part,  I've chosen to include all the basic principles of the event and season. I don't want to fill my kids heads with historical jargon and miss out on the more important and relatable aspects of the holiday. The holiday is about celebrating what we've got. I choose to focus on family, friends, food, a home and even things beyond basic necessities such as toys or vacations. We'll talk about how Thanksgiving started and why it was first celebrated (i.e. the first settlers had a tough time living in the new land, they received help from native peoples and then celebrated their harvest), but discussing and practicing the concept of being thankful is more important than learning an abstract history lesson for my four year olds. 

Be safe and sweet, y'all.