November is a really short month for my district. The first week is only 3 days due to NJ Teachers’ Convention (the first Thurs/Fri of every November). Then we have 1 regular week of school, followed by a week of half days for parent/teacher conferences. Then it ends with 2.5 days during Thanksgiving week. So with most grades I’ve started a unit that will stretch into December or built on a unit I started in October, but with pre-k I just focused on Thanksgiving this month.

We’ve continued singing our “Fall Song,” and I’ve told the kids I have a new winter song for us to learn in December. We’ve watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. We read David Milgrim’s Thank You Thanksgiving and Margaret Sutherland’s Thanksgiving Is For Giving Thanks. After those stories we drew pictures of the things we are thankful for, and I hung them up in the library gallery.

We’re thankful for everything from Mom & Dad, Wolverine, and rainbows to snow and chocolate milk.

Then we read I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson. The kids loved it, we played a memory game to try and recall everything she ate. We also read Margaret McNamara’s Happy Thanksgiving, which emphasizes good fire drill behavior, too. It was a good, straightforward month with them.