I'm a thankful JESIE teacher-- thankful for the wonderful schools I teach at and thankful for my awesome coworkers at JESIE. I was thrilled to see these two sides come together, as coworkers John and Josh each taught a Thanksgiving-themed lesson plan to one of my 4^th grade classes at Langya Lu Primary School.

Josh's lesson held students attention from start to finish with a lively, moving PowerPoint, the dog he throws around to indicate who can speak, and the point system which turned the whole lesson into a lively competition between Team Scarecrows and Team Leaves. He opened with a vocabulary lesson that introduced students to essential Thanksgiving foods. Next, the vocab was reinforced with several games. There was first a memory game where students first read a “How many ___ are there?” question, looked briefly at a photo, then answered the question allowed. Later, students were bouncing up and down, begging to compete in spelling races, where a photo would pop up on the PPT and a pair of students would race to write its name correctly on the board. The learning continued with an introduction to Thanksgiving traditions that was tested again with a memory game.  The last phase of Josh's class began with students taking turns telling the class what they are thankful for.

Downstairs, John's lesson introduced similar Thanksgiving vocabulary. After several games that reinforced the vocabulary, John took an inventive turn on the Thanksgiving tradition of proclaiming what we are thankful for: “At Thanksgiving I am thankful for everything, except ___.” This introduced a new, useful language point and opened the door to a hilarity that kept students learning and laughing simultaneously for the rest of the lesson. The pinnacle of John's lesson was the singing of a silly Thanksgiving song stuffed with all the vocab they'd picked up throughout the class.

In all the merriment of a happy Thanksgiving, both Josh and John's lessons concluded with the drawing of hand turkeys, a longstanding tradition across American primary schools. As students drew, they continued to put to use their holiday language. This Thanksgiving Open Day was quite a success!