Let’s be honest – as a teacher, holidays are the perfect excuse to whip out a new, exciting activity! I compiled a list of my favorite Thanksgiving activities for upper elementary, so your students can celebrate the holiday, while also reviewing skills.
ELA Thanksgiving Activities
Choice Boards
These choice boards are perfect for early finishers or morning work! Students will be asked to complete various ELA activities, such as research and writing about how Thanksgiving began, and creating an announcement for an escaped turkey.
This Thanksgiving Choice Board Activity is a fun, light-hearted way to get students involved in the holiday. They will have fun writing various types of texts, while also practicing their research and writing skills.
History of Thanksgiving Centers
These centers bring together social studies and ELA to walk students through the history of Thanksgiving. In these centers, students will be presented with various activities including research, reading comprehension, written response, and identifying facts.
If you don’t want to use them as centers, this History of Thanksgiving activity makes great independent work or morning work. The activities are digital, so you can immediately assign it to your students!
Read and Respond
This read and respond Thanksgiving activity is ideal for students who need extra practice with reading comprehension. Students will read one passage about the history of Thanksgiving, and then answer ten questions about the passage.
The read and respond activity is digital through Google Forms, so you can analyze your students data when they are complete. You can use this activity as a center, independent work, or assessment.
Math Thanksgiving Activities
Math Skill Pack
If you feel yourself dragging towards Thanksgiving (honestly, who isn’t!), then this might be the resource for you. This no-prep math pack includes fifteen different activities to help your students review and practice, with also some Thanksgiving fun mixed in.
In this math pack, students will review order of operations, fractions, rounding, division, multiplication, and more. You can use it for homework, centers, morning work, or even sub plans.
Thanksgiving Escape Room
This Thanksgiving escape room gets my kids excited each year. Students have to solve various puzzles and problems using adding and subtracting decimals. There are different reading activities found in this escape room. There are some reading activities
This escape room contains five activities and is completely self-checking! Your students need to be able to access Google Sites and Google Forms.
Thanksgiving PBL
PBLs are an excellent way to make connections between math skills and the real world. In this Thanksgiving PBL, students will design a Thanksgiving party using decimal and fraction knowledge!
They will engage in assignments like designing a menu, ordering food, and creating other party related items. This is a great activity right before Thanksgiving break for students to have some fun, and apply math skills (without even realizing it).
Like I said, holidays are a great reason to review and break out a new activity! Hopefully these Thanksgiving activities gave you some ideas to celebrate with your students.