It's November before Thanksgiving

It's November
The first early days of November I still do pumpkin activities post-Halloween.  We color, cut and sequence four sizes of pumpkins and show from left to right sequencing large to small.


We traced numbers in pumpkins and played a partner game to roll a die and coverup the numbers in order.  Who covers all their numbers first. 

Disguise a turkey home project.  TURKEY TROUBLE by Wendi Silvano was read and an invitation to disguise the turkey picture with their family at home.

The Turkey-in-disguise creations were displayed and the school could vote on which turkey they liked.  Our families are very creative!




Tell this story and conclude with a yummy popcorn snack.

The Magic Seeds by Ann R. Lee

All the Pilgrim women of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were busy cooking Thanksgiving dinner.  Some of them cooked over fires out-of-doors.  The dinner table was out-of-doors too.  It was set and ready for the Pilgrims and their Indian friends.
The Pilgrim women were happy as they cooked.  At last they had enough food to eat.  Their Indian friends had helped the Pilgrim men to plant corn, catch fish, and hunt birds and animals for food.  The pilgrims were very thankful that they had enough to eat.  So they had decided to have a Thanks giving dinner.  Because the Indians had helped them so much, the Pilgrims had asked the Indians to eat dinner with them.
The Indian chief and many members of his tribe came to this first Thanksgiving dinner.  They brought food and gifts for the Pilgrims.
One of the Indians who brought gifts was Quadequina, the chief's brother.  Quadequina stood with two deerskin bags in his hands.  The Pilgrims crowded around him.
Quadequina reached into one deerskin bag.  When he pulled his hand out of the bag, it was full of fluffy, little white things.
"What are they?  They look like tiny white flowers!" a Pilgrim girl said.
Quadequina laughed and put some of the white pieces on the Pilgrim girl's hair.  But next, he did a strange thing.  He popped a few of the white pieces into his mouth!
"Why, it is some kind of food." a Pilgrim man said.
Quadequina nodded his head.  He reached into the other deerskin bag.  He took out a handful of small seeds that looked like corn.  Then he walked over to a cooking-fire that was burning inside a circle of rocks.  He put the handful of seeds on one of the hot rocks.  Then he stood waiting
Pop!   Pop!   Pop!
Quadequina laughed as the Pilgrims gasped in surprise!  The seeds jumped off the hot rock as they popped.  And as they popped, they turned into the white fluffy things that Quadequina had taken from the first bag.
"Look" a Pilgrim boy shouted, "It's magic!"
One of the Pilgrims tasted this new kind of food.  "Ummm Delicious!" he said.
That's how the Pilgrims first learned about popcorn.  The Indians were eating popcorn long before the Pilgrims came to America.  Indians wore strings of popcorn around their necks and one around their heads when they danced.
It was thought that popcorn was eaten by people thousands of years ago.  But Pilgrim women were the first mothers to serve popcorn for breakfast with sugar and cream.  Popcorn was the first "puffed" breakfast cereal.
Today not many people eat popcorn with sugar and cream.  But each year, lots of people eat popcorn with butter and salt as a tasty treat.

One year a teaching friend was the narrator and I acted out the part of Quadequina.  I donned a headband yarn braid and a Halloween 'native American' costume.  Even to this day, I get the giggles about it.  The adults enjoyed it as much as the kids.  We used a hot air popcorn popper to dramatize the popping.