A Thanksgiving Holiday Unit Study for Homeschoolers

In my last post on homeschooling, I explained how we’re spending part of our Winter Break doing some focused holiday unit studies with a bit of unschooling mixed into the mix. I talked about how I put a unit study together, and I shared our Halloween holiday unit study schedule as well.

Today, I thought I’d quickly drop in to share our Thanksgiving holiday unit study with you all in case you’d like to give this one a try too.

Thanksgiving Holiday Unit Study

Topic & Time Frame

Like I said, this holiday unit study was centered around Thanksgiving, specifically the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans, and was a short study. We started on Wednesday, November 14th and ended Wednesday, November 21st — 6 days of study total.

Subjects

For reading, we downloaded Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving from Librovox.org. It’s a short story and was fun to listen to. We broke it up into equal parts over the course of the week. This is how we started our mornings. After breakfast, the boys would pile on the floor with their blankets and pillows, and we’d listen to 10 minutes or so of the audiobook before moving on to something else.

For history, we used Scholastic’s interactive site on The First Thanksgiving. Each day we listened and watched videos on the different areas on the site (Mayflower, Daily Life, Feast, Historical Letters).

For grammar, we worked our way through a series of writing exercises together, paying attention to correct capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar rules, etc.

For poetry, we used Ambleside Online’s Thanksgiving poems. I chose one poem for each day. We read the poem through once, talked about things that caught our attention, read the poem again, and then discussed our thoughts on the meaning.

For math, we used Education World’s popcorn math which has lots of popcorn math activities. We did 1-2 activities each day.

For food, we didn’t do too much this time around, although you certainly could if you wanted to. We made homemade apple cider one day, and on Thursday, before heading to our family’s homes, I had the three oldest boys each help me make a different Thanksgiving dish.

We did incorporate picture studies in this time around. We chose Norman Rockwell’s The Four Freedoms and Thanksgiving: Mother And Son Peeling Potatoes to study. We looked at one each day and discussed what we saw, what we liked and disliked, and what we thought the paintings meant or symbolized.

For art, we made a thankful tree, thumbprint turkey paintings, and pinecone bird feeders.

For science, we used Education World’s popcorn science, and I chose one experiment for each day. Each experiement revolves around popcorn, coming up with a hypothesis for each text, and then performing it to see if your hypothesis was correct or not.

For geography, we had one activity where we glued popcorn kernels to the states that produce the most corn in the United States. Again, we used Education World’s popcorn geography for this, and the boys were interested to see the results!

We also watched the Hallmark Channel’s version of An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving which is quite different from the book but still a good movie. We watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (a holiday classic) too.

As always, the boys had their daily readings in their science and history books as well as another book of their choosing. They also have piano practice and Spanish lessons they do each day as well.