FIAR- A Cranberry Thanksgiving

This story was really cute and the kids loved it as they have with most of our FIAR selections. It is about a grandmother and her granddaughter. The grandmother has a famous cranberry bread recipe that she plans to give to her granddaughter some day. Every year they have a Thanksgiving feast and invite someone who doesn’t normally get a Thanksgiving meal, or who will be alone on Thanksgiving. This story gets to the heart of how we shouldn’t let our judgment of someone be jaded because they don’t fit the image we like, or they aren’t rich, and might not look the way we want.

 

Bible: Matthew 22:1-14 /The Wedding Banquet 

In this book the Grandmother invites someone to the feast based on his looks and what his status seemed to be. (he had a gold cane) Grandmother soon finds out that this was not a wise choice and that she shouldn’t judge based on appearance or status. I read the story of the wedding banquet to the kids and we talked about how it was (kinda) similar to this story, and about how the story applies to our lives. The kids really seemed to respond to this lesson.

Geography: New England States, Vermont

The kids enjoyed locating all of the New England states on the map. We had studies the New England states when we rowed Night of the Moonjellies so it was fun to see what they remembered. To my surprise they located three without my help. The New England states are. Connecticut, Main, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. We chose to take a closer look at Vermont, and the kids colored the Vermont page of their Color the States book.

History/Social Studies/Language Arts: Life as a pilgrim, The First Thanksgiving, Vocabulary Words

We read the book The First Thanksgiving. It gave a decent historical account of The First Thanksgiving in a way that the kids could understand. We also read a book called Christopher Columbus that was a little bit more “real”. I wasn’t sure about it, but it was actually a good discussion to have with them about how we treat people, and why it is important to learn the difficult parts of history so that we don’t repeat those mistakes.

In the back of the book The First Thanksgiving there were some really great discussion Q & A’s about life as a pilgrim. We also went through this awesome online tour together. It was really neat. http://www.plimoth.org/media/olc/intro.html

At the end of The First Thanksgiving there were vocabulary words. I went over the words with Christopher, and had Hailey choose five of the words to look up in the dictionary and record her answers.

Art: Warm and Cool Color Pallet

I had a lesson all planned out for this. We sat down and started talking about the difference in Warm and Cool colors. This was a really bug off day for the kids. So, I let them watch the newest Tinkerbell movie and had them point out the different colors in the warm world and the cool world. Not to worry though because the next day we completed the original lesson I had planned.

 Memory Making: Thanksgiving Feast of their own

The kids invited some friends that live down the street from us over for a Thanksgiving Feast. (snack time) This was the highlight of our Row.