Our Favorite THANKSGIVING Books and Activities

The links on this blog and in the posts may be affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for full details and thank you for your support!
It's that time of year! When if you are a homeschooler or maybe have preschoolers and/or toddlers at home, you might be considering planning out things to do next week for Thanksgiving! Maybe you have eyeballed some crafts on Pinterest. Or are trying to collect some great books to read. In order to help fuel your ideas, here are some things that I try to work in to our Thanksgiving week studies each year!

Thanksgiving Books

Okay, let's not beat around the bush. Finding books is probably like the EASIEST thing to do. Nearly every library already has them up on display for you--but there are SOOOOOOOOOOO many! How do you know what ones to get? Well I always go with our "tradition" ones, and then like to add in a few new ones each year. Some of them are factual but most of them are just fun! Here is a short list of my favorites, as well as the ones that I grabbed for our reading basket this year--they are mix of older and younger reader books!


The factual ones
The First Thanksgiving--by Jean Craighead George
Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims--by Rush Limbaugh (also the audiobook version!)
Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving--by Eric Metaxas
If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620--by Ann McGovern
Squanto's Journey: The Story of the First Thanksgiving--by Joseph Bruchac
1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving (National Geographic)

The fun ones
Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving--by Dav Pilkey
Cranberry Thanksgiving--by Wende and Harry Devlin
Thanksgiving is Here!--by Diane Goode
Berenstain Bears Give Thanks--by Jan and Mike Berenstain

Thanksgiving Crafts/Activities

Here is where it gets challenging because there is just SOOOOOOO much you can do! I'm going to make it easy for you--I have pinned some of my favorites in an All Things Thanksgiving board on Pinterest. So just head over there and find the things I have either tried myself, have on the radar for this year, or I think is just adorable. We are going to be doing some of the name cards, garlands, and table decorations. I also enjoy finding Mad Libs or games to incorporate too. I have really been hitting hard the Super Teacher Worksheets Thanksgiving section. They even have entire spelling lists with coordinating activities for K-5 geared around Thanksgiving. I have printed off the sheets for 2nd Grade and 5th grade (the highest there was) to use with my boys. CHSH-Teach, LLC is another go-to for me. And let's not forget that Notebooking Pages is ALWAYS an option for Thanksgiving week--we will be using their pages for recording our book information this year. You can even snag a FREE Thanksgiving Notebooking Pages Sampler for yourself!

FREE Thanksgiving Notebooking Pages from NotebookingPages.com.

Thanksgiving Shows

YouTube is my friend during the Thanksgiving week. There are SOOOOOOO many possibilities and with our ROKU, we can pull them up and watch them on our regular TV! It's tradition for us to watch classics like Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (you can find playlists with the whole show all together) or It's the Mayflower Charlie Brown (also sometimes can find it whole, or can watch it in parts) or The Mouse on the Mayflower. There is also a Wild Kratts Happy Turkey Day Episode. But we also enjoy watching documentaries for kids and videos of the Plymouth Plantation. I encourage you to make YouTube your friend for these types of things!

***

I hope that my suggestions here will make it a little easier for you to pull together a Thanksgiving themed week for your home and school. I am hoping that I will be able to share what all we decided to do on Sunday (Nov 26) once all our Thanksgiving related things are over. As always you can stay up with what is going on here on the farm via Instagram and Facebook, so make sure you pop on over and say hello!