As you approach the holiday season, these 7 Unique Thanksgiving Homeschool Lessons are going to be perfect for teaching your kids about why we celebrate each year. Thanksgiving Day comes with many myths and legends, as well as a lot of fact. These fun ways to teach your kids about the truth behind this day and why we should remember each year. You can start with this Thanksgiving Printable Unit Study
7 Unique Thanksgiving Homeschool Lessons
Have fun teaching your kids how to roast corn. As corn is often associated with Thanksgiving due to the traditional fall harvest process, this is a great fun way to teach your children about harvest time and how Thanksgiving plays into that. A fun project that is interactive is to grab some ears of corn still in the husk, and teach your children how to clean the silks off, then roast them by cooking over an open fire or on a grill. This is of course a project to closely supervise, but can be tons of fun and is a great way to show your kids about how much work it takes to clean corn for use after harvesting.
Visit a farm during harvest. If you live in an agricultural area, it is a great time of year to contact a local farm and ask for a tour and information about how they go about harvesting crops. For wheat, corn, rice, soybeans and general produce there are multiple methods of harvesting. You can talk about how harvesting has changed through the years. It is a great time to cover how Thanksgiving was chosen for the fall because it was often a time of being thankful that harvest was done and they had food for the winter months. These Celebrate the Harvest Printables are a lot of fun.
Create a Thanksgiving themed sensory bin. For the younger crowd, a sensory bin is a great option. You can include things like dry beans, popcorn kernels, leaves, acorns and other traditional fall and Thanksgiving items. As they pick out different items you can share how they may have been important to the first settlers. How corn and beans provide families with months of food during harsh winters can be a great lesson. Another angle would be to talk about how things like the number of acorns birds and squirrels gathered could indicate if it was going to be a harsh or mild winter.
Teach survival skills around early settler needs. Spend a week or two talking about the vast differences between society today and the way early settlers had to struggle and work to even make a simple meal. You can teach your kids about gathering wood for a fire, looking for safe foods growing in the forests, or even spend some time with some fresh wheat they have to grind to create flour to make bread. Teaching them about the difficulty it took to provide basic needs will give them something new to be thankful for.
Count feathers on a turkey. Another fun Thanksgiving homeschool lesson for younger kids is to work on their counting skills by giving them a fun simple craft. Cut out simple feather shapes from construction paper and then have your kids add them to a turkey image you have printed or drawn on paper. You can give them an assignment that is similar to a word problem. Ask the to pin 5 brown feathers, 4 orange feathers and 3 yellow feathers to their turkey, or similar simple tasks that hep a younger child with letter and color recognition.
Teach your kids the Turkey Trot dance. It is a fact that the dance the Turkey Trot was in fact created after the way a turkey moves around in real life. While not directly related to Thanksgiving, since most people eat turkey on the holiday, it’s a fun way to include some physical exercise and tons of laughs into your Thanksgiving homeschool lessons.
Study the origins of Thanksgiving outside the United States. There has long been a religious day of thanks in many cultures outside the United States at the end of harvest. Look at England’s Puritans and even the Separatists and their religious celebrations of fasting then feast after harvest. You can also go back to ancient Egypt, the Middle Eastern countries and even Rome and Greece for traditional events around harvest that signified thanks for another year of food and provisions.
These fun and unique Thanksgiving homeschool lessons will be great to include alongside your spelling worksheets, vocabulary lessons and of course your favorite books and movies around the turkey filled holiday.
You may also like these History of Thanksgiving Homeschool Ideas
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