Pilgrims, Pumpkins, Mayflower and More

We’re using the entire month of November to study Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and the first Thanksgiving. My kindergartner is really enjoying all the lessons, crafts and activities we’re finding regarding how the people from the 1600’s lived (and what they lived without!) and what the voyage was like on the Mayflower. (No television, refrigerator, etc. etc.) Last month we learned about Columbus which was a nice lead-in to our more in-depth studies now.
Here are some of the books, websites and activities we’ve been using this month and will continue through November.
“What is Thanksgiving Day?” By Margot Parker is an adorably illustrated, charming tale of a big sister explaining the first Thanksgiving to her little brother. It has what I consider to be just the right amount of religious inclusion of the Pilgrim’s faith and giving thanks to God-- not so much to be the total focus of the book yet still enough to display faith as a history and a very natural present-day extension of the holiday. If you are not a praying family, you probably wouldn’t care for the book, as the children in the story thank God, but for my family it was perfect. It is a great introduction for young children and I recommend starting out with it.

From there, I highly recommend the Scholastic series of “If you…” books. We’re currently working from “If you sailed on the Mayflower in 1620” by Ann McGovern which we are reading from a little each day over the course of a week. (For 2-5 grade students, here is an awesome accompanying literature guide with test and review questions for this book, some you have to be a member to view and other portions you can view for free: Lit Unit)
We made a small Mayflower ship out of an egg carton and popsicle sticks that we sailed across the “ocean” of a world map we traced onto blue poster board. The next day, we picked up an appliance box from the local furniture store and made our own Mayflower to sail across our yard, with Grandma’s house (next door) being The New World.


Plimoth Plantation has an incredibly amazing website with interactive games, coloring pages and a wealth of historical facts at plimoth.org

We also really enjoy watching, “This is America, Charlie Brown,” a two-part video cartoon on the voyage of the Mayflower.

Older children who need a more in-depth documentary will learn a lot from this free pbs series: "We Shall Remain" covers after the Mayflower and Colonial Times with an emphasis on the Natives, will compliment well the materials at plimoth.org, you can view online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/

Scholastic has a terrific set of activities for Thanksgiving: Scholastic

Currclick recently gave away a great Thanksgiving vocabulary game kit and my daughter is loving writing new words every day such as Pilgrim, Pumpkin, Mayflower, Native, Thanksgiving, etc. They also gave a wonderful 141 page unit study about the American Colonies. OHC always makes such thorough guides, I absolutely LOVE when I can get them free from Currclick.



The book, “Colonial Kids” by Laurie Carlson is another recent favorite we’ve added to our home library. It is packed full of activities we’ll be using for years to come. One easy craft we’ve chosen is to make a Quill Pen with a real turkey feather that we had from wild turkeys in our yard anyway and a recipe for homemade ink you make from crushed up walnut shells. It’s really cool and both the kids had fun with it. Now they notice in the pictures and film clips of the pilgrims signing treaties that they are using feather pens like the one we made and think it is really neat.

For more art projects, we’ve delighted in the discovery of the activity tv site online, as you can pause as you go along. My daughter did a super job making this letter P into a Pilgrim:
http://www.activitytv.com/397-p-is-for-pilgrim-cartoon

Older kids will enjoy this advanced cartoon of making the Mayflower ship:
http://www.activitytv.com/398-mayflower-ship-cartoon

A wonderful tie in for us, too, has been some beginning study of the stars as the sailors used the stars to navigate across the ocean. See more of our exploration here.

As we head into the week of Thanksgiving, we’ll be working from “If you were at the First Thanksgiving” by Anne Kamma and making various recipes. My daughter just made a pumpkin pie with Grandma this week (not with pumpkins from our garden though, we used the last of those up at Halloween, and they weren’t baking pumpkins anyway). I was surprised to learn from Kamma’s book that pumpkin pie wasn’t actually served at the first Thanksgiving even though they had and cooked with pumpkins, they lacked other ingredients like sugar. A nice feature in the book lists the ingredients the pilgrims had in a different color in the pumpkin pie recipe they provide, although she and Grandma used a slightly different recipe than the one in the book. Her friends happened to come over later that afternoon, so she was able to share some pie and ice cream with them.

Here are a couple more books I can suggest for just-for-fun Thanksgiving reading. Fun Thanksgiving Books.

Halloween Fun!

We had a great Halloween this year, trick-or-treating and pizza as always with another family we're close with. The kids loved it and so did we. This year, (their choice!) my children were Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip. My son will initiate playing Sleeping Beauty on a daily basis, believe it or not. He puts on the vest, grabs his stick horse and brings my daughter her dress. She pretends to sleep under the kitchen table and, after slaying the dragon with a stick, he crawls under there to give her a kiss. Yep, it's melt-your-heart adorable.




And this pumpkin from our garden was feelin' a little green...

Patches of Pumpkin Fun (& learning!)

We grew pumpkins in our backyard garden this year. It was our first attempt, and it was surprisingly successful! We've had over a dozen perfect pumpkins from August to October. The kids have had so much fun watching them grow, ripening from green to orange and carving them into jack-o-lanterns! I usually let my husband do the pumpkin-gut scooping with the kids (outside, whenever possible!) because half the fun for the kids is making a huge mess with the core. Plus, my husband enjoys toasting the pumpkin seeds, so he doesn't mind the mess. He separates the seeds into a bowl, rinses them and lets them dry on dish towels overnight. Then coat with melted butter, salt them on cookie sheets and bake for a half hour at 350-degrees, flipping them half-way. They're nice and crunchy and the kids love them, too.
For more educational exploration, let your kids use various "science tools" while they "dissect" the pumpkin. They can examine the stringy core, seeds and hollow pumpkin shell with magnifying glasses, measuring cups and more.
Don't want to hassle with the guts? Having kids (even young ones) paint the pumpkins is great fun, too! One year we had a small Harvest party and I got a big giant bowl of small pumpkins, squash and gourds, lined the table with butcher paper and set up small paint cups with brushes for the kids to decorate. (Make sure you have some place to dry them before guests leave.)
Here's a fun activity involving a variety of squash and gourds:
Squash Sorting
Line up an assorted collection of squash and gourds (acorn squash, spaghetti squash, Hubbard squash, etc.) for your kids to classify according to color, size, shape, weight, etc. After they've classified them, get out the paper and crayons to draw pictures of them, allowing them to move from concrete to semi-concrete items.

Exploring pumpkins is also a great opportunity to introduce the sphere shape with your kids, if you haven't already.

The book, "From Seed to Pumpkin" by Wendy Pfeffer (Link) is wonderful. My family has enjoyed many volumes from this series of "Lets-Read-and-find-out" science books. You can find & request them from your library for free. (We've also enjoyed "Why do the leaves change color?" and "From Seed to Plant" from this series... and I'm sure others that I can't think of at the moment.)

Here's a fun pumpkin coloring page:


And, if your family enjoys Halloween, even if only select portions of the holiday, you'll find nearly 100 different lesson plans and related educational activities at this great site: Halloween Lesson Plans.