November Week 1 {Thanksgiving Themed Unit}

This week we primarily focused on Pilgrims and the Mayflower. In addition to our phonics program and reading/writing,  the learning objectives were:

To learn who the pilgrims were and why they left England
Facts about the Mayflower
What life was like when the Pilgrims reached America

Mayflower Fact Book

I got this adorable idea from the First Grade Parade.  We read a few books from the library and came up with 4 important facts to include in our Mayflower Facts book. Little Wright said that the Mayflower voyage is a trip she would never want to go on. I would have to agree with her on that.

The scholastic.com website has some really neat tools for learning about the Mayflower. the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag Tribe and the First Thanksgiving. We got to see th route the Pilgrims took from England, what the conditions were like on the Mayflower and a virtual tour of the ship.

 

All About Pilgrims
Also on the Scholastic site we took a virtual field trip of the Plimouth Plantation. For a kindergartner the video is a little dull, so I explained it to her myself as we watched along. It was really neat to see a visual representation of the Pilgrim’s life!

We did this keepsake Let’s Make Pilgrims Craft by FirstGradeBlueSkies. (click the link for the complete template)

Notice how this pilgrim girl has a purple hat and purple shoes? That’s because the black hat with the buckle and black and white clothing pilgrims are depicted as wearing is actually a myth! One of the books we checked out from the library explained that the pilgrims actually wore more colorful clothing. The stereotypical pilgrims we see in pictures stems from artists’ portrayals of the pilgrims and I guess it stuck all these years later. The buckles didn’t even come into fashion until later in England. I verified this on a few sites including history.com.

I got this pilgrim suitcase activity idea also from FirstGradeParade. We talked about the types of things the pilgrims brought (and didn’t bring) with them on the Mayflower. We then made a suitcase and talked about the kinds of things Little Wright would pack if she had to leave her home and go far away to a new place to live.

Sight Words, Writing and Stories

In addition to learning and reading about the Mayflower and Pilgrims we’ve been working on sightwords, reading and writing. I taped these thanksgiving vocab words ( Thanksgiving Fun Unit from Andrea on Teacherspayteachers.com) up on the wall in our dining room and Little Wright actually referenced these on her own during free time. While I was making dinner, she grabbed some markers and paper and starting writing sentences with her sight words and looking at these words on the wall to help her write stories. I will definitely start making sight words and new vocab words more visible from now on.

We have been using these Color, write and put together site words worksheets from kindergartenkindergarten.com for the last few weeks I LOVE them. They really have helped Little Wright take off with reading and writing.

We’ve been reading the story Pardon That Turkey on wegivebooks.org (all books are free on this site) as our reading comprehension book for the week.

And for fun we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Next week we are going to learn about the Native Americans (the Wampanoag Tribe), the first thanksgiving and do some turkey and thankful activities.

To see what we were doing in Math this week click here

Have a nice weekend everyone! Have you guys started planning your thanksgiving menus?? I’ve set up a Thanksgiving board on pinterest with some ideas, so check it out.

xoxo

Becca