A Magical Homeschool

Want to work Thanksgiving into some of your homeschooling fun this week? Here are eight ways to incorporate grammar, creative writing and other language arts lessons into the holiday.

• Do a Thanksgiving mad lib. Here’s another. These are a great way to learn parts of speech!
• Challenge the kids to see how many words they can make out of “Thanksgiving Feast.”
• Ask the kids to write journal entries from kids who might have been at the first Thanksgiving. Here (PDF file) is a list of the names of the married women, adolescent girls, adolescent boys, children and men at the first Thanksgiving (page 3), along with several accounts of the 1621 feast.
• Ask the kids to write a fictional letter to the editor from a turkey trying to convince people to eat vegetarian on Thanksgiving.
• Have the kids write THANKSGIVING down the side of a piece of paper and compose a poem about being thankful with each letter starting that line. Younger kids can just list things they’re thankful for that start with each letter.
• We have holidays that celebrate people, events and ideals. Ask the kids to think up a holiday they’d suggest and write up a page about why our country ought to adopt it. When would the holiday be? What special traditions would be associated with it?
• Have the kids write out 5 nouns, 5 adjectives and 5 verbs they associate with Thanksgiving. To make it especially challenging, have them put them in alphabetical order.
• Invite the kids to write a short Thanksgiving poem and then record it as the family’s answering machine message this week.