Free Lesson Plan for Thanksgiving – Day 2
Next week is Thanksgiving, so I designed some fun Thanksgiving printables and our own FREE lesson plan! While we usually have a lighter holiday schedule in our homeschool classroom, this year we are doing more focused work during the Thanksgiving season.  Mixing things up to occupy the boys this year will help them to learn more about Thanksgiving origins while keeping their minds off the fact that Daddy may not be able to join us.  For Day 2 in this unit study we will visit a few of our favorite themes and continue using the book The Very First Thanksgiving as a great resource to guide.
Math Lesson Plan
Provide your child with fake feathers from the craft store, use them as math manipulatives for one to one correspondence counting, skip counting, and for simple addition and subtraction problems.  Additionally you can have children separate the feathers by color and count how many you have in each color.  This is great for color recognition, classification and math all in one simple activity. You may also pull out the Thanksgiving Math Worksheets and play the matching game to help them focus on pairs.
For older students, use the feathers as a way to help count when completing word problems, or even with some of our multiplication and division worksheets.
Language Arts Lesson Plan
Read the story The Very Fist Thanksgiving to and with your child.  Add to the “ I Am Thankful For “ prompt you began yesterday.
Match the Thanksgiving words to the Thanksgiving Pictures in this printable. Help your child sound out the beginning sound of each picture to guess the vocabulary word. Â You may also assign additional practice writing the Thanksgiving words listed. Â This will help with site word recognition of the words, as well as hand writing skills.
Art Lesson Plan
Create a fun edible cornucopia to represent he first Thanksgiving feast. Using waffle cones, icing and various candy corn, candy pumpkins or even simple chocolate candies, let the kids fill the cone with “goodies” that could have been in a traditional cornucopia. Â A little icing inside or along the tops of the waffle cone will secure the Thanksgiving themed candies to the makeshift cornucopia. You can even give them small baggies with shredded coconut and a few drops of green food coloring to shake and color to use as grass around their cornucopia.
History/Geography
On day 1 you showed your children the path from England to Plymouth Rock where the first Pilgrims landed.  Today show them on the map again, having them trace the journey with their finger. Talk to your children about how the landmark in Massachusetts today that is called Plymouth Rock, contains only a small piece of what the original rock was.  The original Plymouth Rock has been broken and parts of it housed in various locations as part of history. While a trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts would take you to the original location of the rock, you may not be able to see the actual literal rock that was used to tie off ships when Pilgrim's landed.
Sensory Bin Ideas
Bring out the play dough made on day 1 for kids to explore and play with again.
Additionally, fill a shallow bowl or bin with popcorn kernels. Â Add to the popcorn things like feathers, acorns, fall leaves, and seas shells. Â Let kids search for the items buried in the popcorn kernels. Â Go an extra step and blind fold them to encourage their senses to discover what they are finding buried in the popcorn, without actually seeing it.
Additional Resources
