Thanksgiving Week Activities

Lucky for me, a few years ago my district switched to taking the whole week of Thanksgiving off. Let me tell you how wonderful it is. I am so sorry if you still must teach. Those two days we taught felt like an eternity.  I teach in an affluent area, so I tended to only have a portion of my class those two days. Most of my class was off traveling and enjoying the break (lucky them). I, being a teacher, don’t have the luxury of whisking off to the alps (yes, this was one of the places I had students go). I was stuck here, which was fine with me because I couldn’t even imagine having to travel after getting through report card period. However, if you have ever taught you know that there are a few things that hold true about this two-day week. One, teaching anything of significance during these 2 days is basically the dumbest thing you could do. Most of the kids are so checked out and beyond ready for the break. Getting them to focus on listening to a story is hard enough, let alone learning a new math concept. Two, with half your class gone, teaching a significant lesson is the second dumbest thing you can do. Guess what, you’re going to have to reteach it when everyone is back so we’re all on the same page. With these two truths kept in mind, it creates a wonderful two-day week of figuring out what to do with the kids you have.

 When I first started it made it a lot of review and catch up on things we had missed. I realized quickly both the kids and I were very over that quickly. So, I did what I do best, I improvised. We did art, read books, created stories and tried new things that we never had to time to do. One year we decided that we were going to learn how to use the green screen and create pictures of us at the first Thanksgiving. Was it chaotic? Yes. Did I have any clue what I was doing? Not so much. Did my first and second graders (yes, I had a split class) have any clue what they were doing? Not in the slightest. Did we have so much fun figuring it out together? Yes, we did. Did the pictures turn out perfect? No but we all had so much fun figuring out together that it didn’t matter. From that moment I decided that these two days would be days of my class and me doing fun things that we create together. And that’s what I did for the few years we still had school during Thanksgiving week. I started to come up with activities that went well with the type of class I had. Some classes are much more artistic than others. Some like more tech-based activities. I just changed what we did based on who was there. I did keep one thing in common, I didn’t focus on being the one with all the answers. This week I really took in their ideas and suggestions and let them help guide what we did. I was able to also help teach them new things one on one that maybe we don’t normally have time to do. I felt like if our classmates can go off and have fun traveling, we can make sure we’re having just as much fun staying here. It was always so sweet to hear the kiddos explain to their classmates what they missed. It was also shocking to see the kids’ faces when they were so sad to have been traveling instead of with us. We then switched to having the week off, and I was a little sad I couldn’t do all the activities I normally did.