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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Tis the Season

December is almost here. It was always the shortest month in the school year for me, so I felt it necessary to accomplish as much as possible in the two and a half or three weeks of instruction available while, at the same time, celebrating the spirit of the season with my students.

 

Since learning to achieve sentence variety is a skill that all good writers must master, we worked on varying sentence patterns. Because I wanted to celebrate the spirit of the Christmas season, the sentences I put in the sentence combining exercises all had Christmas and winter holiday themes.

 

Although there is nothing wrong with sentences that begin with the subject followed by the verb, the writing becomes monotonous if a writer repeats this pattern in sentence after sentence. Most grammar checker apps will flag this writing weakness. Since ELA teachers are the official "grammar checkers" for their students, they will be watching for this also.

 

The best way to achieve sentence variety, is to move phrases and clauses to the beginning of some of the sentences or locate them in different positions to avoid the repetitive subject-verb pattern.

 

 

Here’s what I mean.

 

Original subject-verb pattern:

All my gifts sat under the tree waiting for me to open them.  

 

Revised:

 

Under the tree, sat all my gifts waiting for me to open them. 

 

Here’s another example:

 

Original subject-verb pattern:

Many people send Christmas Cards to friends and relatives a few weeks before Christmas.

 

Revised:

A few weeks before Christmas, many people send Christmas Cards to friends and relatives.

 

 

Original subject-verb pattern.

My mother insisted that we write our thank-you notes before we could play with our toys.

 

Revised:

Before we could play with our toys, my mother insisted that we write our thank-you notes.

 

You can create an exercises like these for your students to practice varying sentence patterns. The more practice they have, the better their writing will become. Here’s a free one you can print or use in Easel.

 

Here’s a FREE resource for you to use.

 

I have seven more sentence patterns resources that are ready to use and include the answers. You can purchase them separately or buy them in a bundle and save 20% on the individual resources. One of them is Thanksgiving themed and another is for Christmas. I hope you will find them helpful. You will find the bundle here.

 

I hope you have a happy, healthy, and restful winter break. I will celebrate with my husband, daughters, and grandsons. We will eat entirely too much and play board games after dinner. I look forward to both.

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