The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag

Thanksgiving Stereotype

Thanksgiving is one my favorite holidays. Thanksgiving is typically one of the least commercialized holidays, but little guys still tend to pick up a lot of misinformation, especially about the Pilgrims and Indians, from images and stories.  I found an article from Understanding Prejudice which had some great suggestions for talking to kids about Thanksgiving at home and at school.  I also found this site which provides guidelines for teaching about Thanksgiving in culturally sensitive and historically accurate ways.  I used a lot of the suggestions from both articles to guide my instruction around the holiday this year.

In particular, I really wanted to be sure that my kiddos understood the origins of Thanksgiving.  We started by doing K-W-L (What We Know, What We Wonder, What We Learned) Chart.  Not surprisingly, the kiddos had random pieces of the story, including "We eat turkey" and "The Pilgrims had a feast."  However, they still wanted to know things like, "Who were the Pilgrims?" and "When do we celebrate Thanksgiving each year?"  We read the book Thanksgiving Is..., by Gail Gibbons to look for answers to our questions. The book begins by describing harvest festivals from around the world.  We discussed how almost all cultures celebrate the harvest by giving thanks for food and the land.  

Then we went on to discuss the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans.  For this, my fabulous first grade co-worker put together a SMART board presentation full of facts and interactive lessons about the Pilgrims' journey to America and the first Thanksgiving Feast.  She shared pictures of Native Americans from the past and today to provide perspective for the kiddos.  

Then she explained that the Pilgrims left England to pursue religious freedom but got off track on their voyage to Virginia and ended up landing at Plymouth.  The kiddos learned that the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts taught the Pilgrims how to harvest corn, squash, and pumpkins (but no pumpkin pie).  We also found out that at the first Thanksgiving they probably had a lot of seafood, venison, and wild geese, in addition to turkey.  We ended the lesson by doing a comparison of the First Thanksgiving and a traditional modern Thanksgiving.  I am very grateful for thoughtful and intelligent colleagues who are always up for examining new ways to teach old lessons!