How the Thanksgiving Season Enriches ELA Classrooms

 

As the air turns crisp and the scent of cinnamon and pumpkin pie invites thoughts of home, gratitude, and harvest, secondary ELA classrooms can seize the Thanksgiving season as a meaningful opportunity to blend creative writing with emotional literacy. Thanksgiving gives students space to pause, reflect, and express themselves and gives teachers the chance to grow their writers through authentic, heartfelt tasks that resonate beyond the classroom.

 

A lesson plan idea!

Thankfulness as a Writing Mindset

Gratitude writing is more than a feel-good exercise. It develops emotional awareness and refines students’ voices. 

 

1) As a preliminary exercise, ask student to prepare a short list of people to whom they are grateful and list the reasons why their influence has touched them. Then choose one of those people and list as many reasons as they can think of for their gratitude toward this person.

 

2) Consider having your high school writers choose someone who has made an impact on them (teachers, mentors, coaches, or family members) and write a letter of gratitude they can present to them.

 

Writing the letter will not only fulfill academic goals like structure and clarity but also gives a student a purposeful reason to write beyond assignment points. Imagine your classroom filled with the quiet scratch of pens composing genuine thanks.

 

For students who are hesitant to write such a personal expression of their feelings, explain that they do not have to give their letter to anyone but you, if they so choose.

I have two no-prep resources that I always used before the Thanksgiving break. My students enjoyed them. Perhaps your students will also.

 

Good writers vary their sentence patterns by sometimes placing phrases or clauses at the beginning of their sentences. The twenty Thanksgiving-themed sentences in this exercise all begin with the subject and the verb.

 

Teach your students to rewrite sentences without changing their meaning to achieve sentence variety. At the same time, they will be reminded of things that are associated with Thanksgiving.

Click here for this resource.

 

This is a fun exercise that helps students practice Higher Order Thinking Skills as they work in small groups to classify items into general and specific categories.

Students will examine ten groups of four items and determine into which general category they fit. Then, they will determine which item is different in some way from the other three and remove it. What remains will be a specific category that they will identify.

I used this exercise on one of the days before Thanksgiving to give my students' minds a workout and to celebrate the holiday.

Click here for this resource.

Thanks for reading my blog post. Here’s a FREE and fun activity your students will enjoy while exercising their Higher Order Thinking Skills.

 A fun and challenging exercise to enhance Higher Order Thinking Skills. Students will find the word that matches each definition by replacing only one letter in the previous word. 

Only one letter is replaced in each step. All other letters will remain in their original position.

My students enjoyed working in pairs to complete this exercise.

 

Download your FREE resource here.

May your holiday bring warmth, rest, and renewal along with countless reasons to be thankful for the transformative power of words.

 

Happy Thanksgiving! May your students' engagement in these activities remind you why teaching writing is a gift that keeps giving.

 

All the best,

Charlene

 

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