2 Adorable Pilgrim Crafts for first grade thanksgiving lesson plans
Hellooooooooo, Thanksgiving break! Yahooooo!!
Today was our last school day until next week. During this short week, we have been doing a 2-day cram session of Thanksgiving. Yesterday was all about Thanksgiving traditions, pumpkin pie, and turkeys!
Today was all about the pilgrim crafts for first grade and the history of the first Thanksgiving.
We are currently in the middle of our Fables and Economics unit. In this Common Core unit, we focus on the elements of fables, the economic ideas in them, and the life lessons that the fables and economics teach us together.
Even though the story of the Pilgrims is not a fable, the Pilgrims are a great tie in for this life lessons and fables unit because of all of the life lessons the Pilgrims learned through their real life experiences: “Hard work pays off,” “Treat others the way you want to be treated,” and “Follow your dreams.” It’s a good time to talk about how we don’t just learn life lessons from characters in stories, our own experiences teach us life lessons too!
And that makes it a great transition into Thanksgiving week after ending our Fables and economics unit! Let’s take a closer look at the history of the first Thanksgiving and the life lessons of the Pilgrims.
Shared Research for Pilgrims & The First Thanksgiving
We started off our morning reading one of my favorite history readers on the First Thanksgiving.
This book gives tons of great details but is perfect for young readers. It is a longer read, but there is not too much text on each page…and the information is rich and compact. That makes it easy to stop after each page or every few pages and discuss the information from the text.
As we read, we charted our research on the Pilgrims on this fun Mayflower anchor chart. I love turning anchor charts into visual shapes that help kids lock in what the information is related to.
Pilgrim Crafts for First Grade writing displays
Once our shared research on the first Thanksgiving was finished, my first graders wrote an informative paragraph about Pilgrims and we made girl or boy pilgrim crafts for first grade to display with their writing.
Here is our girl pilgrim craft displayed with our informative writing and a close-up view of the craft itself. I had templates for my first graders to cut out for their faces and ears. The girl hats I precut from paper plates. And the collars, buttons, and eyes I had a parent volunteer cut with my large hole punches (2″ and 1 1/2″). She used the paper cutter to cut white rectangles for collars. The kids drew and cut their own hair for their face and drew in their own nose and mouth.
Since my teacher example was a girl…here are a few of the finished boy pilgrim crafts by my first grade boys. The boy pilgrim hats were templates they cut. And the buckle rectangles were precut by a parent volunteer with my paper cutter. Again, they added their own hair and face details!
Some boy pilgrims were bald, with fancy collars! …And others had beards. This group of silly boys were loving being creative with their pilgrims this year!
Pilgrim Poems
We also read our Pilgrims poem during our shared reading time. We highlighted the “sparkle words,” or vocabulary words. Then we used 2 of those sparkle words to label our illustrations of our pilgrims. Then, they circled sight words they know and added it to their poetry binders.
These pilgrim crafts for first grade and other Thanksgiving lessons are included in my Pilgrims packet or my full 6-week Life Lessons Unit.
