Mayflower craft Thanksgiving lesson – Adventures in a Messy Life

There are a whole slew of great books about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower to use for our history lessons, but I wanted to do something a little different, so we watched, drumroll please:

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (affiliate link, there are several more in here)

I remember seeing this as a little kid and my Mom recording it, as well as the other historical specials (which I think I’m the only one who remembers these), and then watching it over and over and over again. The Pilgrim Thanksgiving is included as a bonus feature and I make the kids watch it every year…….

 Ahhhh……  Good times!

(Future Ticia here, now at 10 and 11 years old, they ask to watch the Pilgrim Thanksgiving, and the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving)

And what else do you do when learning about the Pilgrims, but make a Mayflower?

Our Mayflower craft

I saved a whole slew of milk cartons and orange juice cartons, much to Jeff’s chagrin, who was wondering why our counter was covered in drying milk cartons. I cut a hole in them, and then let the kids happily paint their own Mayflowers with brown acrylic paint.  They spent a happy few minutes painting and chatting away after watching the Charlie Brown Mayflower episode.

Putting our Mayflower craft to work to make a Mayflower small world play

And now, about a week later, while they’re resting, I’ve set them up along with two of the lighthouses to be a fun playscape when they come down from “resting.”  I grabbed some of my blue fabric and set up an ocean, grabbed a few of their Imaginenext figures* (I grabbed Castle figures, but it looks like they’re not a set anymore).

What do you think, will this get me a few minutes of time alone?

Looks like the answer is yes.

Some books to go with our Mayflower craft

Future Ticia 2025, coming here to add in a few more things, because while for our lesson we just watched the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving video, I know that there are some amazing picture books we can grab. I know I’ve got them listed on my Homeschool Thanksgiving page, but let me give you a few I really like.

• Thanksgiving Mice– I love this one for preschool and kindergarten age, it’s a cute book for kids that quickly tells the story of the Pilgrims crossing the ocean with mice putting on a play. I love the illustrations
• Sarah Morton’s Day– This is a great book with pictures of a young girl from a living history museum reenacting the day of a girl from the colony after the Mayflower landed. There is a similar book for a young boy and for a young boy from the Wampanoag tribe (I think that was the tribe, it’s been years since I read that book), but that was the book I once owned a copy of.

Want some more Pilgrim history to go with your Mayflower craft?

While I haven’t written a lot about Thanksgiving, I’ve got a few great bits about what happened to the Pilgrims after they got off the Mayflower.

• By GmaJoli – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51381537
• By Unknown author – https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/nby_teich/id/21342, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67029417
• Originally published June 3, 2011