It's November!!

This November I had to go ahead and restructure my plans...normally I do election stuff around President's Day but with the election happening I decided to rearrange and talk about elections in November.  Also, we have a full off for Thanksgiving rather than 3 days...ughhh.  Anyone else have this happening this year?? How do you feel?? I'm feeling like those 2 days before are also a nice time with my students and also that no one else in my family is taking the whole week off so I'm just hanging around for 2 days until we are all ready to go on our family trip on Wednesday.  But may be that's just me...    

Anyway, so I restructured my November plans...

Week 1: Past/Present: Mayflower, Pilgrims & Wampanoags   

Week 2: The forming of America & Elections

Week 3: Thanksgiving Traditions

We started off this week by reviewing the past and present by doing a past and present sorting activity. We did a lot of Past/Present work when we learned about Christopher Columbus so this is just a continuation of that & America's history.

We started by learning about the Mayflower today.  We began by picking up & [[skim]]  reading one of our favorite book series!!

As we read a section of the book, we would jot down fact onto our "Life on the Mayflower" anchor chart.

After we had researched about the Mayflower, what life was like on the Mayflower, and why the Pilgrims went on the Mayflower I told the students it was time for them to pack their chests because they were about to go on their own Mayflower voyage.  They were SO EXCITED!  We reviewed what things the Pilgrims were allowed to take with them & then they were each handed their own chest to pack with things that they would have had in the Pilgrim era.  

Click on the pic above for a free copy of the template.

Once they all had packed their chests, they were told to meet at the carpet.  We happened to do this entire lesson in one day; however, it can easily be split into 2).  We talked about how we were going to pretend the carpet was the Mayflower.  As we sat aboard the Mayflower, we watched the 1st 10 minutes of "Charlie Brown - Mayflower Voyage" - while I do not watch video often, there are so many benefits of using this one!! 

1) It is pretty historically correct

2) Charlie Brown is pretending he was on the Mayflower Voyage - just as the students were

3) The sounds within the media often changed based on the emotions happening - so we paused & talked about what the purpose of the sound was (TEK #16B)

Note: Before we watched, we did talk about how this is a tool to enable us to learn more about long ago & reiterated that they did not have technology back then.