History of Thanksgiving

About this resource

Teach the history of Thanksgiving with short, factual reading, a timeline to cut and paste, and writing with room to work. This is a complete kit for one topic, built for the table where children need different amounts of support. Four topics are each written twice, at a grade 2-3 level and a grade 4-5 level: the Mayflower voyage in 1620, the Wampanoag people (then and today), the harvest feast of 1621, and how Thanksgiving became a national holiday. Children read, answer three questions on every passage, build the vocabulary, compare years, put eight events in order, sort, draw and write. It comes with three answer keys, a tracker, a class grid and a family page, so nothing has to be written from scratch.

EVERYTHING INSIDE (38 pages)

• 22 student pages in 10 page types: Fact Chart, Word Chart, Match the Word, Which Came First?, Read and Answer, Fill It In, Draw It, Put It in Order, Cut and Paste, and Write About It
• 8 reading passages, 4 topics at 2 levels: 4 passages of 60 to 72 words (grade 2-3) and 4 passages of 78 to 96 words (grade 4-5), with 3 questions each (24 questions)
• 80 scored items on 17 pages, every answer read from the data behind the page, never typed by hand
• 6 facts on the chart, each with its own picture, and 8 vocabulary words (voyage, colony, colonists, harvest, feast, tradition, proclamation, Wampanoag) with a kid-friendly meaning and a sentence box
• 32 cut-and-paste pieces: an 8-card timeline and 3 sort mats (8 pictures, 8 short sentences, 8 full sentences)
• 3 writing pages with primary lines and a drawing box
• 3 answer keys, generated from the same data as the student pages
• 1 tracker (page, page type, items right, date) and 1 whole-class progress grid
• 1 team note (a hand-off page between team meetings) and 1 home page
• 1 filled example (an invented student), 1 phrase bank (16 observable-language starters), 1 binder cover and 6 divider tabs with a spine label to cut out
• Start Here and a how-to-read-a-page page

The Page Types, Easiest First

1. Fact Chart (starting): six picture cards (Wampanoag, Mayflower, three crops, harvest feast, a national day, today), eight words to know, and two lines to write one fact.

2. Word Chart (starting): eight word cards, each with a meaning and a box for the child's own sentence.

3. Match the Word, 1 page (1 dot): a word and four pictures. Circle the matching picture and write its number.

4. Which Came First?, 1 page (2 dots): two events, each with its year. Write A or B for the earlier one.

5. Read and Answer, 8 pages (2 dots for grade 2-3, 3 dots for grade 4-5): a passage and three questions, each with three lettered choices.

6. Fill It In, 2 pages (2 or 3 dots): Set A writes the word for a picture from a box of six; Set B finishes a sentence from a box of eight (three are not used).

7. Draw It, 1 page (3 dots): four big drawing boxes, one prompt each.

8. Put It in Order, 1 page (3 dots): eight dated timeline cards in a block of straight cuts, pasted into boxes 1 to 8.

9. Cut and Paste, 3 pages (1, 2 or 3 dots): a big two-box sort mat and a block of 8 pieces that touch edge to edge. Paste 1 sorts pictures into Food and Things; Paste 2 sorts short sentences into True and Not true; Paste 3 sorts full sentences into Plymouth Colony and A National Holiday.

10. Write About It, 3 pages (2 or 3 dots): draw the harvest feast and write three sentences; write how Thanksgiving became a holiday for the whole country; write about the Wampanoag long ago and today.

Careful, Checkable History

Only well-established facts are used: the Mayflower sailed in 1620 with about 100 passengers and settled at Plymouth; the Wampanoag are a Native nation whose homeland is in what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and Wampanoag people live in New England today; in the fall of 1621 about 50 colonists and about 90 Wampanoag men shared a harvest feast that lasted three days; the colonists did not call it Thanksgiving; George Washington asked the country to set aside a day of thanksgiving in 1789; Sarah Josepha Hale wrote letters asking for a national holiday; Abraham Lincoln named the last Thursday of November in 1863; and Congress set the fourth Thursday in 1941. Where sources do not agree, the set says nothing, so there is no menu and no claim about why anyone sailed. The people on the Mayflower are called colonists, and the stories note that they are often called the Pilgrims. The pictures are our own drawings of a ship, corn, a pumpkin, a wetu, a calendar, a basket, beans and cranberries. No people are drawn.

Built For The Child Holding The Page

A big "My name" line, one short instruction, large rounded type, big answer boxes, primary writing lines and dots (not words or colors) to show which level a page is. Nothing on a student page is written for an adult. The drawing boxes are about two inches tall so there is room to work. Cut pages use five or more pieces in a block, so the cutting is a few straight lines. The file prints clean in black and white.

No Guessing The Answer

Wherever a child picks among printed spots (which picture matches, which event came first, which lettered choice is right, the order of the pieces on the cut strip), the position of the right answer is checked so it does not sit in the same spot three times in a row.

Type In, Or Print

The name line and every answer box are type-in fields in any PDF reader: click one, type, then save. The same goes for the tracker, the class grid, the team note and the home page. This is a fillable PDF; it is not a Google Slides or PowerPoint file.

Who This Is For

Elementary classrooms, self-contained and resource rooms, and any teacher adding a short, factual look at the history of Thanksgiving to a November social studies or reading block, a center or a small group. Use the grade 2-3 passages and the grade 4-5 passages in the same room, and the teacher can read any passage aloud.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

A set of history of Thanksgiving reading, vocabulary and writing worksheets with the record-keeping around it. It is not a full social studies curriculum, a timed test, a screener or a clinical tool, and it makes no claim about any student's age or rate of progress. There is no IEP goal language or eligibility wording anywhere in the file. Your district sets your own social studies expectations.