Thanksgiving Lesson

Although many American holidays like Halloween and Christmas are well known in Japan, Thanksgiving is not. But this is my personal favorite holiday, and a very important one for America anyway, so I definitely wanted to teach my students about it. So today at one of my junior highs, I taught my students about Thanksgiving. I got the brilliant idea for this lesson from one of my ALT friends (thanks, Tricia! :)), and it turned out to be hilarious!  

I made a blank comic and instructed them to look at the pictures and guess what they thought is happening. After teaching them only three keywords: settler, Native American, and corn; I gave them the comics to write their own stories based on the pictures. After working on the comics for about thirty minutes, I told them the real Thanksgiving story. The stories my students came up with were absolutely brilliant, and I was walking around class cracking up as they worked. Here are the results of our lesson:

Third Years

First Years

Second Years