Here are my picks for The Best Sites To Learn & Teach About Thanksgiving (not in a strict order of preference):
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.
Scholastic has a good feature on The First Thanksgiving that provides audio support to the text and is very engaging.
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 because they appear to host the card indefinitely on their sites.
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.
To leave out even a mention of his life as an enslaved person 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 use with 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 one resource helpful in developing lessons that give a little more of a critical perspective to Thanksgiving (you’ll find others later in this post). It’s 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from Education Week titled Rethinking Thanksgiving (the post itself is thought-provoking, though the link within it is no longer active).
This new viral hit “It’s Thanksgiving” by Nicole Westbrook could be a fun song to play and sing with English Language Learners. It’s pretty fast, but students could just focus on certain lines. The song highlights other holidays, too, which is a nice bonus. It’s not like there are that many pop songs about Turkey Day.
It shows a recipe (and an image) representative of the culture of each state for a dish prepared there for the holiday.
Food is the topic of my New York Times Learning Network post for English Language Learners, and it’s chock full of some pretty unique lessons. In addition, it discusses how to apply Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” to those lessons and, in fact, to just about any other lesson, too.
From the StoryCorps App: three immigrants share their stories about their first Thanksgivings in the United States, and the traditions they’ve created with their families. https://t.co/Rl57GhdiGqpic.twitter.com/TMGf1oZ7CL
Exactly. No one likes to see the pilgrims this way but they were in fact the first to arrive to this land filled with multiple indigenous tribes (so it already was a multicultural nation) and to arrive w/o permission. No one likes to call them the first “illegal aliens”. MORE pic.twitter.com/UdmLslopiu
We asked service members, veterans and civilians who have observed Thanksgiving in a conflict zone to share their photographs and memories. Their stories are vast and varied, like combat service itself, and reflect the range of experiences while deployed.https://t.co/noVMF6ZDrL
As this essay continues to make the rounds, I’m struck by the fact that those most bothered by it seem to be most bothered by me — the immigrant in me — that I speak well, that I write well, that I have a platform & I had the nerve to use it in this way. https://t.co/YzCit71KAp
The Thanksgiving pumpkin pie is now a symbol for sweet, sweet national unity. But it was once a hotly contested battleground in America’s original culture war. In the 1800s, the humble pumpkin became a totem of the fight to abolish slavery in America. https://t.co/hiVMkcgfqH
“We shouldn’t celebrate genocide, but we can honor those who were killed, elevate Native voices, and embrace that spirit of generosity that Indigenous people shared with the Pilgrims.” — @Ruth_HHopkins in @TeenVogue #Thanksgivinghttps://t.co/N2p5U23Vmi
I know out teachers will gain some good ideas. Just out of curiosity, how did you know our blog had referenced yours? Google Alerts? Or was there something else? I am always trying to learn!
Another exceptional list. Keep up the great work. The videos and accompanying resources look especially promising. As always, thanks.
Anita Prentice
on November 17, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Thank you for trying to include some Web sites that are not insulting to Native Americans. Unfortunately, many of them do propagate a total myth and one that is very insulting to Native Americans – and has been for centuries now. Is that a reason to keep recounting it? Please visit the Web site http://www.oyate.org and read how current day Native Americans remain deeply offended by the so-called “First Thanksgiving.”
Larry,
I know out teachers will gain some good ideas. Just out of curiosity, how did you know our blog had referenced yours? Google Alerts? Or was there something else? I am always trying to learn!
Thanks,
Frank
Great post!
Hi Larry,
There’s also a lesson on Thanksgiving here: http://www.eslholidaylessons.com/11/thanksgiving.html
Many thanks,
Sean
Another exceptional list. Keep up the great work. The videos and accompanying resources look especially promising. As always, thanks.
Thank you for trying to include some Web sites that are not insulting to Native Americans. Unfortunately, many of them do propagate a total myth and one that is very insulting to Native Americans – and has been for centuries now. Is that a reason to keep recounting it? Please visit the Web site http://www.oyate.org and read how current day Native Americans remain deeply offended by the so-called “First Thanksgiving.”
Amazing, Helpful List. Your rock!
You mention BrainPOP as one of the only two websites you think worthy of paying a subscription to….May we ask what the other one is?
Thanks!
Eileen,
You can read about them here:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/02/13/the-best-web-resources-worth-paying-for/
Larry