Looking for engaging resources for Thanksgiving? Activities that are more than just busy work? This collection of Thanksgiving blogs, classroom activities, and middle school ELA resources will help you celebrate the season while keeping students engaged and learning.
The week before Thanksgiving break can be one of the trickiest times of the school year. The week itself is often an odd length depending on if you are having school for just two days or three. Which means students are pretty much checked out the whole week no matter what.
The good news is that despite the awkward schedule, Thanksgiving naturally lends itself to meaningful reading, writing, and language activities.
Whether you’re looking for some new resources for Thanksgiving, some creative writing ideas, vocabulary practice, reading comprehension activities, or interactive review games, we’ve gathered some of our favorite Thanksgiving content from The Sparkly Notebook blog all in one place.
Need a few ideas before planning your Thanksgiving lessons? These blog posts are full of ideas and activities that reinforce important ELA standards while celebrating the season.
4 Standard-Aligned Thanksgiving Activities
Discover four engaging Thanksgiving lessons that reinforce reading comprehension, figurative language, narrative writing, and vocabulary while keeping students excited about learning.
5 Thanksgiving Writing Activities Your Middle School Students Will Actually Enjoy
Explore five one-day writing activities including the Presidential Turkey Pardon, descriptive writing through the five senses, a historical children’s book project, vocabulary practice, and personal narrative writing.
Here are a few of our favorite Thanksgiving writing and literacy activities that work well in middle school ELA classrooms.
Introduce students to the Presidential Turkey Pardon by reading a nonfiction passage and discussing the tradition together.
Then, challenge students to write a narrative from the turkey’s perspective explaining why it deserves to be pardoned. Students will want to include dialogue, descriptive details, internal thoughts, and a clear sequence of events as they develop their stories.
Bring in a small Thanksgiving-themed food (while being mindful of allergies) and ask students to describe the experience without ever naming the food.
Encourage them to think about sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch as they write. The goal is to create such vivid descriptions that classmates can guess the food simply by reading their writing.
Combine research and creative writing by having students investigate the First Thanksgiving before creating their own children’s book.
Students can use Google Slides or another presentation program to tell the story of a child experiencing the First Thanksgiving firsthand. Encourage them to include historically accurate details while writing in language appropriate for younger readers.
We really love how mindful students have to be about word choice as they work through this writing activity.
Challenge students to organize important Thanksgiving events in chronological order while discussing why sequencing matters when reading informational texts.
This activity naturally reinforces chronological order and reading comprehension skills while helping students better understand the historical events surrounding Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving provides the perfect opportunity to practice replacing ordinary words with stronger vocabulary.
Students can revise simple Thanksgiving sentences using more precise language before creating colorful classroom displays that reinforce strong word choice throughout the remainder of the season.
Challenge students to write Thanksgiving-themed similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, idioms, or alliteration.
Students love creating seasonal examples, and the finished work makes an engaging classroom display while reinforcing important language standards.
If you’d rather spend your time teaching than creating activities from scratch, these ready-to-use Thanksgiving resources make it easy to keep students engaged before break.
Students practice chronological order, reading comprehension, plot structure, sequencing, and informational reading while solving Thanksgiving-themed challenges.
Reinforce similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, idioms, alliteration, and onomatopoeia through collaborative Thanksgiving-themed puzzles.
Introduce students to the Presidential Turkey Pardon through nonfiction reading before guiding them through an engaging narrative writing activity complete with graphic organizers, evidence-based questions, and writing supports.
Help students strengthen vocabulary and improve word choice while creating festive classroom decorations they can reference throughout the season.
Thanksgiving doesn’t have to slow down learning.
In fact, it can become super engaging when students are given meaningful opportunities to read, write, research, collaborate, and create. By combining seasonal themes with standards-based instruction, you can keep students motivated while continuing to build important ELA skills.
We hope these blogs, activities, and resources for Thanksgiving help make November one of your favorite months to teach.
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at The Sparkly Notebook!
