Thanksgiving in EAL and Environmental Club
Thanksgiving in EAL and Environmental Club
This week we learned about Thanksgiving across all our EAL groups and in the Environmental Club. All ages had the chance to watch a short educational video that explained what Thanksgiving is, where it came from, why people celebrate it, and what traditional foods families enjoy on this holiday.
In our EAL lessons, we worked with a comprehension text and answered questions to check understanding. The children also solved a Thanksgiving crossword, searched for themed vocabulary, and our younger students matched new words with pictures. They enjoyed coloring a Thanksgiving picture according to a color code, watching interactive quizzes, and playing fun Thanksgiving games to practise new vocabulary.
Our Year 1 and Year 2 learners especially enjoyed the story Clifford’s First Thanksgiving — the gentle mix of kindness, celebration, and Clifford’s warm red enthusiasm made the holiday feel close and familiar to them.
To deepen their understanding, we also put on a short drama with our Year 2 EAL children. The students wore masks and pretended to be Pilgrims or Indigenous people. They acted out sailing on a boat to find a new home, building houses, fishing, planting vegetables, and learning how to survive in a new land. They ended the drama by sharing food and saying “thank you,” showing the spirit of cooperation and gratitude at the heart of Thanksgiving.
Our Year 2 learners also cut out paper cornucopias and filled them with drawings of different foods. They matched pictures with the correct Thanksgiving vocabulary and even tasted a piece of real pumpkin bread. A small moment of “yum” made the lesson feel wonderfully real.
To make the celebration even more exciting, our Environmental Club explored the meaning of the cornucopia, also known as the “horn of plenty.” We then created our own beautiful cornucopia using real popcorn — and of course, tasting popcorn was part of the project! Since corn was one of the important crops that Indigenous people taught the Pilgrims to grow, we agreed it was the perfect Thanksgiving snack.
And as a lovely coincidence, our last Environmental Club meeting fell exactly on the final Thursday of November. We marked this special day by preparing a funny homemade roulade together. The children created a “sausage dog” coconut roulade, rolled it carefully, decorated it with joy, and proudly took it home to celebrate with their families.
It was a week filled with language learning, cultural discovery, creative hands, warm stories, and shared flavors — a quiet reminder that gratitude grows beautifully when we learn and create together.
November really was a busy month, full of moments worth remembering.
Ms. Eva Gogova
