Thanksgiving – Making Connections Between a Series of Events

This elementary Thanksgiving unit helps students understand the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving and gives them tools to make connections between those events.  By the end of the unit, students can describe the historical events that lead the pilgrims to celebrate the first Thanksgiving.

There is a series of blog posts about how I teach this Thanksgiving thematic unit for middle elementary grades.  You can access PART ONE,  PART TWO and PART THREE.

Through this unit, students learned how to create a timeline, how to describe how events are connected to each other and how to ask and answer questions about historical events.  This has been developed into a full product that is described in this blog post.

This series of blog posts focus on the second grade Common Core Standard that asks students to “describe the connection between a series of historical events . . . in a text.”  Over several weeks, we learned how to connect the events, but we started here with the timeline, where we recorded the events.

What is included in the resource

Since this has been a series of blog posts, I won’t go in-depth about each piece of the process, but give you an overview of it with links to each post.

Here is how I taught this unit:

Timeline & Vocabulary Resources

We created a timeline of the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving.  You can read more about it in this blog post. 

Included in the resource are vocabulary cards and pictures to develop your own full-sized timeline.  I mention in the blog post that I photocopy images from books.  The Thanksgiving Unit has color pictures to print instead.

Also included is a timeline worksheet where students can cut and paste the events.  I found that my students needed more interactions with the events and learning the relationship of them.  

This was one more way that they could organize the information.

Book Suggestions

In the resource are a variety of book suggestions.  You can use any books about Thanksgiving.  These are the ones I read to my students:

• Squanto’s Journey
• Thanksgiving Is
• The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving
• The Pilgrims of Plimoth
• The First Thanksgiving
• On the Mayflower
• Scholastic News: Come Join the Feast

Ask and Answer Questions about the Timeline

The next part of the unit is to ask and answer questions about the timeline and events.  You can read more about the process we went through for this section in a more in-depth blog post. 

Included in the resource is an Ask and Answer Questions worksheet.

Also included is a Sentence Construction Chart.  Many of my students were . English learners who had difficulty with the complex academic language.  This chart helped them read and write sentences about the events. 

Assessment Page Where students describe the connection between events

The final piece of the resource is a page where students describe the connection between events.  It’s an assessment page that includes a rubric and a space for drawing.   You can read more about it in this blog post. 

The process we went through from creating the timeline, to describing the events in detail, to asking and answer questions, to the students’ final product was amazing.  I was so proud of what they could accomplish with some scaffolding and in-depth time on a topic.

How to Purchase the Thanksgiving Unit

This Thanksgiving Unit can be purchased on my website or on Teachers Pay Teachers.