The last day of “Thanksgiving School” is always a fun day. We read a silly book, The Night Before Thanksgiving, which, just as it sounds, follows the same pattern as The Night Before Christmas. This story does an excellent job of highlighting most of American Thanksgiving traditions–turkey and pumpkin pie, visiting family, football, Pilgrims, and parades. It sadly doesn’t mention Who we are thanking on this holiday, but it is a secular book, after all, and you can’t get everything you want in one book.

Because we do need to learn a little something, we also read Milly and the Macy’s Parade. I found this book a few years ago, and while it is a fictionalized tale, it does give a good idea of how America’s most famous parade came about. It also helps children get a good feeling of what it might be like to be strangers in an established country, and how you might try to bring a little bit of “home” with you in any way you can.

Every holiday should include watching one fun, non-educational movie, so we picked By the Light of the Silvery Moon. It isn’t technically a Thanksgiving movie, but part of it does take place at Thanksgiving. It’s a fun movie, and there some hilarious scenes with a live turkey intended to be Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey and Bunny think it’s a great movie–their laughter was quite raucous!

We finally finished our “thankful turkey” today, too. It’s always fun to see what kind of things Turkey and Bunny come up with when giving thanks–some very sweet (learning about God, their family), some completely obvious (Legos), and some very surprising (the police–I’m assuming the public servants, not the band, but as Turkey is familiar with Rock Band, who knows?).

We have also made hand and footprint turkeys every year. I try not to reuse crafts too much, at least not yearly, but I think this is a special one, because it lets me keep a record of how much the children are growing. In Kindergarten, I had to do all of the cutting for Turkey and Bunny, (12 hands and 4 feet in total–it took forever!), because it was more exact than they could do at that point, but now they can do it all by themselves. This is one of the crafts that I make sure we save at the end of every year, and I know that I’ll love looking back on them someday!