Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Thanksgiving is coming-up in a few weeks, so I thought another “The Best…” list was in order.

As with The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus, pretty much all the online resources accessible to English Language Learners tell the usual and uncritical story of Europeans and Native Americans.  So the first part of this post shares those accessible links, while the second part lists online resources that I’ve found helpful to me in developing classroom lessons that try to demonstrate a Native American perspective.

Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving (not in a strict order of preference, but with the ones I think that are most accessible listed near the top):

Brainpop and Brainpop Jr. have two good Thanksgiving movies that provide closed-captioning. Unfortunately, both require registration — either as a free trial or as a paid subscription. Brainpop is only one of two sites on the entire Web that I think are worth paying for but, as I mentioned, you can also get a free trial.  These are the only two sites on this list that are not free.  Of course, I think they’re the best, too.

Scholastic has a good feature on The First Thanksgiving that provides audio support to the text and is very engaging.

Pilgrim Village is a simple E-Book, also from Scholastic, that provides audio support for the text.

EL Civics has an ESL Thanksgiving Lesson that provides a good overview of the holiday in an accessible way.

What Really Happened At Thanksgiving? is an interactive from Plimoth Village where players become investigative “historians.”

This is a nice listening exercise where students have to pick the words from a drop-down menu while listening to the text (about Thanksgiving) being read. The same site has a series of shorter Thanksgiving listening exercises.

The History Channel has a ton of online videos and other resources on The History of Thanksgiving, plus excerpts from their special presentation on the Crossing of the Mayflower.

Here’s a simple matching exercise to learn about Thanksgiving food.

Students can send Thanksgiving E-Cards and have links to them posted on teacher or student websites/blogs. The best ones are from Blue Mountain or American Greetings because they appear to host the card indefinitely on their sites.

The Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving is a very accessible “web adventure” where students have to answer questions along the way.

Here’s an online Thanksgiving crossword puzzle from the Internet TESL Journal.

Thanksgiving in the USA and The First Thanksgiving in America from “Many Things,” the excellent resource for ESL/EFL activities. They are both multiple-choice “Fill-in-the-blank” exercises connected to Voice of America broadcasts, but very useful standing alone, too.

Heads-Up English has a good short article on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Click on the headphones at the bottom of the page for audio support.

Time Magazine also has a slideshow on Black Friday called Shop Till You Drop.

It’s useful for an English Language Learner who’s trying to understand Thanksgiving to also know about Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There’s a fair amount of “stuff” on the official site, and most of it is pretty useless or inaccessible to ELL students.  However, there is one feature that is very engaging, but there’s no way to link directly to it.  If you go to the site, click on Parade Information, and then go to “History,” you see a neat interactive timeline with images and information from many of the parades in the past.  I think students would enjoy it. Here’s another NY Times slideshow on the parade.

Here is a New York Times slideshow and one from MSNBC about the Macy’s Day Parade.

Eat, Drink, and Be Wary is the name of an interactive from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida.  It shows images and descriptions of various holiday foods. If you click on them, you’ll then see how much exercise you have to do in order to “work off” each food’s calories.  The online activity is accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners and I suspect will be fairly engaging for my students.

Elizabeth Barnwell has created a nice series of online flashcards about Thanksgiving. The language is accessible, and a good number have images, too.

How Thanksgiving Works, particularly The Thanksgiving Image Gallery.

A slideshow from the Sacramento Bee titled Hundreds Line-Up For Thanksgiving Turkeys.

Another slideshow, this time one of U.S. Presidents and the turkeys they “pardoned” as part of a Thanksgiving tradition.

Here’s a related slideshow from the Telegraph newspaper in the UK called What really Happens To The Turkey The President Pardons At Thanksgiving.

How about a slideshow called How Many Calories In A Thanksgiving Dinner?.  Not only does it show the different foods that compose a typical Thanksgiving dinner, but it also shares the calorie content of each one.

Turkey Escape is the latest addition (tongue-in-cheek) to this list.  As regular readers of this blog know, I believe using online video games with walkthroughs (the instructions on how to win the game) are good language-development tools for English Language Learners. You can read more about how I use them in this article.  In “Turkey Escape” players get to develop vocabulary, reading skills — plus rescue a turkey from being served as the main course at a Thanksgiving dinner.  Here’s the Walkthrough.

Thanksgiving Room Escape is a fun online video game that provides English-language-learning opportunities. Here’s its walkthrough.

Read Write Web has 7 Fun Facts For Thanksgiving.

ESL Holiday Lessons has another excellent feature on Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving is a Webquest from Scholastic.

I’m going to add three more resources to this list.  The caveat is that if you are going to use the most obvious and most accessible one, I believe it’s critical that at least one of the other two is also used.

The most visible engaging and accessible to English Language Learners is a new “talking story” with animation from The Weekly Reader called The Story of Squanto.  It’s engaging and well-done.  Unfortunately, it also doesn’t make any attempt at communicating anything other than the whitewashed version of the story.

I don’t consider myself to necessarily be the most “politically correct” person around, but to leave out even a mention of his life as a slave and the destruction of his people seems pretty insulting to Native Americans and to the student audience of the story.  Jeez, I know Brainpop gets criticized, but even their Thanksgiving movie refers to the damage caused to Native Americans.

But I do think the Weekly Reader movie could be an excellent learning opportunity for students, one that I will be using next week with my students.

It could be a great lesson combining that movie with a lesson from Squanto Worksheet from EL Civics, along with questions like:  What are the differences between the stories?  Why do you think they are different?  Are there examples in your own life or culture where the “public” story is different from what really happened?

I’ve also found two resources helpful in developing lessons that give a little more of a critical perspective  to Thanksgiving.  One is from Education World and is called Are You Teaching The Real Story of Thanksgiving? The other is an older blog post from Education Week titled Rethinking Thanksgiving (the post itself is thought-provoking, though the link within it is no longer active).

Of course, the most helpful resource is a book you can buy from Rethinking Schools (which is on The Best Teacher Resource Sites For Social Justice Issues). It’s called Rethinking Columbus.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has some exceptional resources providing a Native American perspective on Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how accessible they’d be to English Language Learners, but the lesson ideas can certainly be modified by teachers.

Rethinking Schools also published a good article, Rethinking Thanksgiving, that shares some lessons that include critical thinking.

Let’s Celebrate Thanksgiving is a brand-new online activity by Renee Manfroid.

President Obama pardons a turkey in this video.

Laurence Haquet creates great interactive books that are exceptional learning tools, including her book on Thanksgiving,

US presidents and Thanksgiving turkeys is a Guardian slideshow.

Presidential Thanksgivings Through The Years is a slideshow from the Washington Post.

Students can learn about the shopping craziness of Black Friday through a Wall Street Journal slideshow and a series of photos from the Sacramento Bee.

The Top Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Thanksgiving is a slideshow from TIME Magazine.

I want to give credit to Ressources Pour Le College, which provided a couple of the best links I’ve highlighted.

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

If you found this post useful, you might want to check out my other “The Best…” lists.

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