Cranberry Thanksgiving
What a cute book about Thanksgiving dinner! “Cranberry Thanksgiving” by Harry Devlin takes place in New England on a cranberry farm. Grandma has a prize winning cranberry bread recipe that she keeps hidden behind a brick in the living room fireplace. She is surprised when an unexpected Thanksgiving guest tries to steal the recipe and even more surprised by who catches the thief!
When I requested this book at my library, the librarian said “Oh that is one of my favorites. And the recipe for the cranberry bread in the back of the book is good too!”
I made up my own agenda for our school activities. Here’s what we did:
Social Studies – Since the book takes place in New England we talked about how we live in New England too. We looked at a map and I told Christopher which states make up New England. His old day care provider moved to New Hampshire and a friend moved to Maine, so he had heard the names of these places before. We also looked at pictures of cranberry bogs that I found on the internet.
Music – The book references two songs, “We Gather Together” and “Sixteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest”. I looked up the lyrics for the first song and realized that we had just sung it in church on Sunday! I had no idea. So I went to the church music player and downloaded it and we listened to it sung by the Tabernacle Choir (I assume) and I sung it for Christopher. Something really cool about the player is that you can choose to hear the different parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). I thought this was awesome because I can’t sing at all, but can follow along a bit when all I hear is my part.
For the second song, I’m assuming that the reference was to the poem “Derelict” based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s book “Treasure Island”. After reading the poem I decided not to share it with Christopher and only told him “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.” Here’s what I found on it if you are interested.
Language Arts – Our homeschooling friend from church gave us a Thanksgiving Tree when we left her Thanksgiving activity last week. This week we filled in what we are thankful for.
Art – Christopher disguised a turkey (as Darth Vader of course) as part of the activity at our friend’s house. We also colored one together at the library.
Home Economics – We made the cranberry bread recipe in the back of the book. Yum.
Holidays – We had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents house. We talked about Pilgrims and Native Americans and about the first Thanksgiving.
3 comments
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I walked right past that book in the library. We picked another Thanksgiving book, but we will be sure to try that one next time. It sounds good.
Permalink2
Ha ha! The reason you had to request it is because I have our library’s copy, and I’ve had it too long!! We were slackers last week and are now getting to it this week.
Did you find any good sites to see bogs? That is on tap for later this week, plus making the bread and stringing cranberries to hang outside for the birds and squirrles!
Thanks for doing the homework for me on the hymn!
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Danna – Sometimes it’s hard to get through a book on time, especially the holiday ones that can only go out for a week. For the bogs, all I did was google “cranberry bog pictures” and it came back with a bunch. I didn’t want any technical information about them, so we only looked at the pictures. Stringing cranberries sounds like fun. I have some left. Maybe I’ll do that with Christopher too! Thanks for the idea.
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