Hi there! Can you believe there is only a week until Thanksgiving!? I am in total disbelief that it’s already November 14th… Time sure does fly.

I’m popping in to share an always-popular Thanksgiving writing activity! This activity was inspired by my wonderful colleagues at Write Now Right Now, and the kids always ADORE it. You can do it before or after Thanksgiving!

5 Days of FREE Thanksgiving Lesson Plans

Enter your email below to download 5 days of FREE lesson plans to use anytime before Thanksgiving break! You’ll receive a free week of Moving Mountains and daily lesson plans for Morning Work, Morning Meeting, Math, and Literacy. The plans also include my favorite Seasonal Read Alouds with related activities.

Thanksgiving Writing Activity

To start, I draw a picture of a table and I tell the kids to close their eyes and imagine their Thanksgiving table. There are a lot of smiles and sounds of “yumm!!” And then I tell them to imagine their Thanksgiving table… AFTER all the food has been eaten! We talk about all the different foods that are on their table and how the “after” picture isn’t nearly as pretty! I get pretty dramatic about this, drawing turkey bones laying next to the platter of turkey, cranberry sauce is spilling out of the bowl, mashed potato remnants are on the table, etc. It’s not a pretty picture!

Spicing up our Thanksgiving Writing

Then, I ask them to tell me something to describe the picture. We write a REALLY HORRIBLY BORING sentence to describe what we are picturing.

Then, we start brainstorming adjectives and verbs to spice up our writing! We brainstorm different ways to begin our sentences, and it’s just a fabulous way to work on sentence fluency and word choice.

Here is what the paper looked like when we did it together in class… I’m warning you, it’s a totally non-Pinterest worthy chart! I almost misspelled Thanksgiving, I’m not sure if it’s spelled ‘boney’ or ‘bony,’ and my drawings are that of a three-year-old, but my students love it nonetheless! I should have taken a picture of their version of the drawing because it was FAR superior!

Here is a copy of the “final” version that we end up hanging in the classroom. I take a bit more time to make this one look nice and presentable!

Finally, they add a topic sentence, transition words, and a conclusion sentence to complete the assignment. It is SO much fun, and I highly recommend it!

Thanksgiving Math Activity

If you are looking for a fun math activity to go along with this, check out my popular math project, Thanksgiving Dinner Digits!  Kids love planning and executing their Thanksgiving dinner.

You can also visit this post for more Thanksgiving literacy and math activities for upper elementary.