Activities for Thanksgiving in Middle School

 

I love finding ways to help my middle school students celebrate a season and learn at the same time!  So it should come as no surprise that as I was planning for November, I began to look for the perfect short story for Thanksgiving.  What I found was "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen" by O. Henry.

In this story, one seemingly well-to-do Old Gentleman always finds a less well-to-do gentleman named Stuffy Pete in the park and takes him to a very lovely Thanksgiving dinner at a nice restaurant every year on Thanksgiving.  However, on this particular Thanksgiving, as Stuffy Pete is heading for the park to meet the Old Gentleman, he is scooped up by a butler who invites him inside a mansion to have a Thanksgiving dinner with two extremely well-to-do ladies.  He can't pass up the opportunity, so he goes inside and stuffs himself.  Finally, he leaves and goes to the park, where the old gentleman awaits him.  The old gentleman takes him to a restaurant, and Stuffy Pete agonizingly eats another dinner while the Old Gentleman watches.  Once they leave, they part ways.  Stuffy Pete collapses from over-eating and is taken by ambulance to the hospital.  A staff member is overheard saying that Stuffy Pete was in for over-eating, which is the opposite of what they'd expect by his looks, while an old gentleman had just been brought in who hadn't eaten for 3 days!  

There is A LOT to unpack here, and some of the vocabulary can be tricky.  So I broke down the story into 4 "chunks," and  then we:

1. First, we went over vocabulary using a foldable.

2. Next, we read the chunk.

3. Then, we discussed what happened in that chunk and wrote a small summary on our story events tracker.

4.  Then, we completed various activities on character traits, point of view, and irony.

After we read the entire story, we paused to really focus on irony. We made a foldable about the kinds of irony and played a practice game.

Finally, we had a fascinating discussion about the point of Thanksgiving celebrations using these questions:

:

Answering these questions in a Socratic Seminar after we read the entire story was a great way to get the students ready to write an academic paragraph about the story.  

There is plenty of evidence students can use from the text to support their answers and if you tell students to write down information from the Socratic Seminar that resonates with them, they will have completed the planning in a very collaborative way. 

My students thoroughly enjoyed this, and I think in part because it was very relevant to the season.  Maybe it gave them all a new perspective, too.  :)

Want to read this with your own students?  I have the story all broken down into chunks with vocabulary and other activities ready to go in both printable and digital formats all in one!

Pin This Post for Later:

Don’t spend hours searching for that great idea you found.  Just pin this to your favorite classroom Pinterest board so you can quickly and easily come back when you are ready.  You’ll be glad you did!

Thanks for stopping by!