Thanksgiving in Preschool

This year, Thanksgiving in preschool looked a little different than it has in years past. Because I finally got brave enough to stop telling the story of the first Thanksgiving, and instead focus on what’s relative to preschoolers. Besides all the controversy over the political correctness of that story, there is the simply fact that it has no relevance to 3 and 4 years old. I always started the story by saying “a long, long, long time ago”. This means nothing to preschoolers. They are still trying to figure out today, yesterday and tomorrow. In a preschooler’s mind, yesterday can mean anything from yesterday to a year ago. And tomorrow might mean tomorrow, but it could also mean next week. The next problem I see with talking about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, is that they are not in the preschoolers circle of contact. Preschoolers don’t know them, can not relate to them and therefore, could care less about them. I might as well be talking about princesses and super heroes, which I might add, are of much more interests to preschoolers. During free play, they never pretend to play Pilgrim and Indians. It is always family, cats and dogs, and of course, superheroes and princesses. That’s what is meaningful to 3, 4 and year olds. So this year, I gave up telling the story of that first Thanksgiving and making noodle necklaces, Indian headbands and vests out of paper bags. Instead, we talked about it means to be thankful for things, how to share and be a good friend, turkeys and how eating the right things can keep us healthy. I even stopped asking what they liked to eat at Thanksgiving dinner, because, they are 3 and 4 year olds. They have had maybe a total of 3 Thanksgiving dinners in their lives and the first two they couldn’t even eat the turkey 🙂

Here are some other things we did, which does include turkey headbands, because they turn out so dang cute!

I set out the water colors and some Thanksgiving coloring pages I had from years past. And I was pleasantly surprised that I had a few this year that actually used all the colors, instead of just black and brown which is usually the colors of choice, as shown in the pictures 🙂