Learning about the first Thanksgiving

Last year, I quickly discovered that most of the library books about Thanksgiving were gobbled up (lol) before I could get to them. I put a few on reserve, and did get to borrow some...but yeah holiday books at my particular library can be tricky to nab in a timely manner.

So, I bought a few, since I figured we'd want to read about Thanksgiving each year anyway. I love to preview books on Amazon by using their "look inside" feature to get a handle on the text and illustrations. Some books that sounded awesome in reviews ended up not suiting my purposes. It's nice to just be able to preview some pages/chapters without buying it first.

Our preschool Thanksgiving books:

















Earlier this week, we read some of the books together and then thought it would be fun to reenact the Pilgrims crossing the ocean on the Mayflower using toys.

I grabbed Johnny's pirate ship, dug out some Playmobil people, and we put down a blue blanket to be the ocean. We used our huggable globe to point out their starting and ending routes and then captain Johnny set sail. Fortunately, we also had an ark that Vivienne used. Couldn't share ships, apparently. Good grief.

Upon arrival in the New World, we had Squanto and Samoset join them. We built them some Duplo cabins.

All the while, Johnny was talking through the storyline of what happened --basically narrating back to me much of what we just read. He just did this on his own and I was impressed at what he remembered and understood.

Fun!

Later, we watched the Charlie Brown's The Mayflower Voyagers on Netflix. I've had trouble finding other Thanksgiving movies on Netflix -- anyone know of any? We also watched an episode of "My Life as a Turkey" lol. Really bizarre but you could see baby turkeys grow.

Johnny was talking about doing some sort of craft, and I'll probably do a quick search for free Thanksgiving coloring pages to print and color. Maybe a more complicated craft via Pinterest, I dunno. I'm not going to overthink it.