Our Three Most Treasured Thanksgiving Stories

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday--the colors, the food, the gathering, the warmth of home, and the pumpkin-infused everything. Over the years, we have read (and re-read) some wonderfully beautiful Thanksgiving stories, and I want to share them with you!

We'll start with the best:


 Cranberry Thanksgiving  by Harry and Wende Devlin is so delicious and heart-warming, it has become a family tradition. Set on a cranberry farm in New England, the story centers around a treasured and secret cranberry bread recipe in danger of being snagged. A sweet and delightful tale, Cranberry Thanksgiving shows us how important it is to reserve judgements and how easy it is to love Mr. Whiskers!

An Outlaw Thanksgiving by Emily Arnold McCully is a captivating story based on the true events. Young Clara and her mother find themselves at a Thanksgiving banquet with a man whose face seems oddly familiar to one they saw on a wanted poster, the notorious Butch Cassidy. Clara learns about human complexity and the unexpected in the Wild West in this adventurous Thanksgiving tale.

Thanksgiving on Thursday (Magic Tree House #27) Like all Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osbourne, readers are plunked right in the middle of the action. Jack and Annie find themselves at the very first Thanksgiving where they meet Squanto and the Pilgrims. What we loved about this book was how we felt simply transported back in time with a rare firsthand look at the origins of Thanksgiving.

 Do you have any Thanksgiving favorites I failed to mention? I want to hear about them!

The Fall Catch-All

It would be an understatement to say I have been extremely busy these last few months. Along with homeschooling, I finished my Bachelor's degree, we moved to a new home, and I have been training for a half-marathon. Whew! The first couple of weeks my camera disappeared and half the time I forgot to take pictures.

So here is my Fall Catch-All post about everything (mostly) that we've been up to this season (things are beginning to calm down now, so I'll be posting more regularly)

Fall/Cranberry Thanksgiving Unit Study

Fall words~

Fall books~

Beyond Turkey by Debbie Herman and Ann Koffsky illustrated a fair depiction of the Mayflower's journey to North America, the Pilgrims' settlement and their feast with the Wampanoag Indians.

Thanksgiving wouldn't be complete without reading Wende and Harry Devlin's beautiful book, Cranberry Thanksgiving.

We love the Magic Tree House series, and Thanksgiving on Thursday did not disappoint. The book is filled with Mary Pope Osbourne's research of the Pilgrims' settlement, lifestyle and clothing. It also fairly represents their relationship with the Wampanoag Indians, making no hesitation to admit Squanto's enslavement prior to the first Thanksgiving.

Fall Fun~

Reenacting the first Thanksgiving and building a Pilgrim house

Playing the "Sailing on the Mayflower" game

We also watched a Charlie Brown cartoon: The Mayflower Voyagers Netflix streaming. Here's a slip on Youtube:

 

Autumnal Apple Treats (Honeycrisp apples doused with lemon juice, slathered with peanut butter and topped with autumn granola mix and cinnamon. 

Field Trip Friday (the Fire Station!)~

We toured the local fire station with about 70 children and parents from Aidyn's home-based charter school. My camera wasn't cooperating with the lack of light in the building so I only have a few photos. The kids checked out the fire engines and fire truck and opened each and every compartment. They toured the living quarters (kitchen, bedrooms, living room, etc.) and peeked down the firefighter pole door. Aidyn said his favorite part was looking at how far down the drop was and wished he could have slid down.

What the Camera Didn't Capture:

~a beautiful and relaxed Thanksgiving holiday

~our Thanksgiving Tree we made with branches and fabric leaves (w/ words of gratitude we wrote on them)

~a beyond messy house

~a stressed out mother/wife/student/runner/worker

Storm in the Night/Weather Mini-Unit Study

We read the beautifully illustrated story, Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz (illustrations by Pat Cummings). This is the perfect cuddle-up-and-read book, especially during a storm.

We recorded the temperature from places all over the world. First, we would find them on the globe and then look them up on weather.com. 

After learning the basic water cycle, we made a cloud in a bottle!

Then rain in a bottle! (links at the bottom of post)

We read about rainbows and different types of clouds and painted our own with white paint and cotton balls.

We also worked on winter words, and Aidyn learned to spell some tricky words, including "icicle"! 

Wish I had more pictures to share!

Forecast for the Future~

I am in the middle of a huge undertaking, but we're only in the pre-planning/dreaming stages. We are heavily considering making a trip to Walt Disney World in January 2015 (we'll need a year to save for it!). This will be a first-time experience for the whole family and the furthest east any of us has ever traveled.

As we have done in the past for Disneyland, I am planning a long unit study on Walt Disney World, which includes four parks and many, many different learning opportunities. Of course, most of the unit study will have little to do with the actual parks and will touch on themes within the parks, but I would like to include some stuff about Walt Disney.

I asked Aidyn which park he wants to focus on first, giving him a quick rundown of what each entails. He chose Disney's Hollywood Studios, which will have us learning about:

• the history of animation
• the history of film
• early Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s
• early film and television stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Lucille Ball,
• classic films such as The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain
• sci-fi flicks of the 1950s
• stage shows
• and more!

In the meantime, we will be playing a little catch-up, reading holiday books, and enjoying the winter break together.

We're weeks away from a family vacation, at the end of which I will be running a half-marathon in support of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (as a tribute to my late father). 

I am still actively fundraising for the charity, so if you are interested in donating, please visit my page: Paula's Donation Page.

Links for the unit studies above:

Both Cranberry Thanksgiving and Storm in the Night are FIAR books.

Free Cranberry Thanksgiving Lapbook/Printables

Free weather unit study printables (including cloud/rain in a bottle experiment)

Pilgrim and Eastern Native American Figures

Sail on the Mayflower Game

Cranberry Thanksgiving

For the last week and a half, we have been snuggling up and reading Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin. Readers peek into the lives of Maggie and her grandmother, who live on a lonely cranberry bog in New England. On Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Whiskers, a furry and foul-smelling but generally nice friend, helps Maggie gather firewood while Grandmother bakes her famous cranberry bread, all while suspecting that Mr. Whiskers intends to steal the recipe. This is a story of simple farm life, warm holiday traditions, and the importance of character. We all learn (and re-learn!) by the end of the story, not to judge a book by its cover.

Cranberry Thanksgiving is a Five in a Row: Volume 1 selection.


Aidyn and I loved reading this little gem from the 70s. Here's what we covered:

Social Studies: Geography - New England

We talked about how this story is set in New England on a cranberry farm. After coloring the story disk, Aidyn went to his world map in search of New England. I prompted him to recall the Mayflower and what we learned last week about the pilgrims before asking, "Now where do you think New England is?" Luckily he plopped it in the right spot and even theorized why they named it New England.

Social Studies: History - Thanksgiving

The previous week, we had learned about the pilgrim's journey on the Mayflower. He colored in this picture of the crossing of the Mayflower from Enchanted Learning. We also watched some videos, including The Mayflower Voyagers (This Is America, Charlie Brown) [VHS].

You can see it on Youtube here.

We also read Gail Gibbon's Thanksgiving Day and talked about current Thanksgiving traditions.



Social Studies: Relationships

On another day, after reading Cranberry Thanksgiving, we talked about the special relationship Maggie has with her grandmother. Then Aidyn, with help, made a Grandmother Book with facts and stories all about his "Branny," with whom he has a very close and special relationship.

Math: Estimation

On the weekend, we read the book in the morning and did some fun math and science activities.

I brought out a 12 oz. bag of cranberries and a strainer. First I asked Aidyn to estimate how many cranberries were in the bag. He held it, squished it, and tossed it around before proclaiming that there must be "100 billion cranberries" inside. I taught him how to scale back that number and come up with a realistic estimate and how our guesses of estimation are rarely correct. The goal is just to get close. He still insisted on guessing 800.

I want to say "painstakingly," but we really had fun counting all 304 cranberries! Aidyn was only 500 off, but I think he learned about over-estimating, for sure.

He's also in Chapter 8 of his Houghton Mifflin California Math book. He's a pro at adding and subtracting single digits now. Yesterday we played Minus Maze, a board game where players solve subtraction problems in order to move their pieces. We played twice with Aidyn winning once and me winning once.

Science: Buoyancy and Bounce!

Right after estimating the cranberries, I asked Aidyn if they would sink or float. I hoped that he remembered we had watched How It's Made: Cranberries on Netflix, in which they show a cranberry bog!

He guessed, "float," so we made a mini-bog in a bowl and found that they do float!

The next experiment was to see how high they bounce. We pulled out our tape measure and launched those berries to the ground. The poor things barely bounced more than 18 inches at most, and that was mostly due to how hard we threw them. On their own, they probably bounced a whole 2 inches.

Wah-wah.

Still, it was fun!

Cooking 101: Cranberry Bread with Fresh Orange Juice and Zest

After talking about after 10 days, we finally made Grandmother's Famous Cranberry Bread, the recipe at the back of the book!

Aidyn helped chop cranberries, juice 3 oranges in the juicer, and crack and beat the egg. He also licked a spoon or two. In the end, we got a fresh loaf of citrusy, tangy cranberry bread, and it was delicious!

Non-FIAR activities:

At Aidyn's K-2 Art class, we've been busy making Indian Corn and a Teepee and an autumnal landscape scene.

He's been busy at his other art class, and only yesterday brought home a beautiful watercolor painting.

He's been perfecting his karate skills once a week and loves it! He has said that he would like to remain in karate and earn a black belt.

When it's not raining and pouring outside, he plays with his friends outdoors, making forts and building Legos.

Phonics and Reading:

He has mastered CVC words and is working on long vowels (CVCV words) and '-ai-' and '-ay' words, as well as a handful of new sight words.

His reading has become much more fluid, and his understanding of what he's read is sharp. I usually ask for oral narrations after he's read a story to check his comprehension.

We have been gently "testing" him on things we've covered during this first trimester. Surprisingly enough, he loves testing (probably because he's never had to take a test in public school!).

We had such a great time with Cranberry Thanksgiving. Next up for us is a virtual trip up north with Very Last First Time. Check back next week to see what we did!