Learning Through Literature about Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. It began as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year.

In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is traced to a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts, and also to a well recorded 1619 event in Virginia. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was promoted by a good harvest. Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. The 1619 arrival of 38 settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia, concluded with a religious celebration as dictated by the group’s charter from the London Company, which specifically required “that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.

As President of the United States, George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving celebration in America marking November 26, 1789 as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.

My Happy Homeschool is learning through literature about Thanksgiving Day with the following books:

 

What Was the First Thanksgiving? By Joan Holub

 

Thanksgiving on Thursday (Magic Tree House Series #27) by Mary Pope Osborne

 

Ideals Thanksgiving by Ideals Publications

Happy Homeschooling!