FIAR: Cranberry Thanksgiving over the holidays

We started rowing "Cranberry Thanksgiving" by Wende and Harry Devlin around Thanksgiving and fell in love with it immediately. What a great book! And so is Cranberry Christmas -- a book I just had to buy the kids for Christmas! These classic tales are going to come out every holiday at our house.

The books gave us a reason to explore New England through videos and books and delve into cranberry farming and harvesting. Plus we got an excuse to make cranberry bread, cranberry relish and cran-apple crisp!

WE READ:
- Night Tree by Eve Bunting
- Cranberry Christmas by Wende and Harry Devlin
- If you Sailed on the Mayflower by Ann McGovern
- The Story of Squanto First Friend to the Pilgrims by Cathy Dubowski
- An Outlaw Thanksgiving by Emily Arnold McCully
- Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation by Diane Stanley
- The First Thanksgiving Day: A Counting Story by Laura Krauss Melmed
- Squanto’s journey : the story of the first Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac
- Cranberries by William Jasparsohn

WE DID:
As usual, we had a great handout with activity suggestions from over at HomeschoolShare.com.

We learned lots about New England.

This doubled as handwriting practice. I wrote the answers on the chalkboard and The Girl copied them on her worksheet.

Images of New England

Cranberries were a point of focus, of course. We learned all about how they're grown and harvested. Be sure to check out the OceanSpray web site.

Math and science experiments with cranberries. I discovered that cranberries I had bought fresh, froze and then defrosted didn't bounce! They had to be fresh!

We also baked some treats using cranberries, starting with the yummy Cranberry Bread recipe from the back of the Cranberry Thanksgiving book. Yum! (We subbed in Gluten-free flour).

Cran-apple crisp

 We decorated our own Night Tree. I think this is going to become a Christmas tradition!

We  also talked about our own Thanksgiving traditions. Instead of doing the "I'm Thankful" corn book in the Homeschoolshare.com materials, we continued out tradition of running a string across a doorway and hanging cards from it listing what we're grateful for.

Plus, I stumbled upon these fun Thanksgiving printables, so we brought them to our Thanksgiving Dinner for a little big of photo prop fun!

 We also used popcorn kernels to work on our estimating and counting skills (popcorn estimation).

There was so much else we meant to do, but we just ran out of time and space given how busy the holidays were (and then we got sick), such as: levening/chemical reaction experiments, baking soda bombs, starch experiments, elements of a good story, alliteration, similes (although we did read Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story by Loreen Leedy), silhouettes and cranberry potpourri.

WE WATCHED:
- Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
- White Christmas (set in New England's Vermont)
- How It's Made - Cranberries (Season 2, Episode 1 on Netflix)
- Fox - Wisconsin Cranberry Videos
- National Geographic Video: Cranberry Harvest
- Tales in a Treehouse: Cranberry Thanksgiving