Unit Nine A fall unit study Ages 4–7
Thanksgiving and Gratitude
$5.99 · One-time purchase
Discover how much of taste is really smell, ask five people what they are thankful for, make place cards for the family table, and listen to cranberries pop on the stove.
Page two
The four books
Read aloud, more than once, in no particular order. Each one is annotated — why it is here and what to watch for. If one of the four is out at the library, four is not the point.
- Sharing the Bread — Pat Zietlow Miller
- Thank You, Omu! — Oge Mora
- Bear Says Thanks — Karma Wilson
- Gracias · Thanks — Pat Mora
The books are not included and they are not for sale here. They are library books, which is the point.
Page five
The science lesson
The tongue recognizes sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and savoury. Much of what we call taste is actually smell arriving at the nose from the back of the mouth while we chew—which is why food tastes different when we hold our nose.
It opens with what the parent needs to know, written for someone who has not thought about it since school. Then a demonstration to do at the table, and one question afterward.
“What does our house smell like today?”
Ask it once. Then be quiet and let the answer come, however long it takes.
And then the rest of it.
- The poems
- “Thanksgiving Day” — Lydia Maria Child, said aloud once a day until it is theirs by Friday. Then “Gratefulness” — George Herbert, read once on the last day and deliberately not explained.
- The activity
- Ask one person each day what they are thankful for and preserve the first true answer in that person’s own words.
- The craft
- Make a folded place card for every guest, with the name on the front and one true thing the child likes about that person on the back.
- Math
- Counting, number bonds to ten, tally marks, which pile has more, and word problems to read aloud — all of it about thanksgiving and gratitude.
- The copywork page
- “Thank you for the food and the table.” on three-line ruling — two lines traced, the rest left blank.
- A devotion, five days
- 5 days, two minutes each at the table — a verse, a sentence, and one line to pray together. New King James Version. Psalm 100:4 · 1 Thessalonians 5:18 · Luke 17:15 · Psalm 107:1 · Psalm 103:2.
- Cranberry sauce
- Fresh cranberries, sugar, water, and orange peel in a twenty-minute recipe made the day before the meal. The child’s job and the adult’s job are written out separately, so nobody has to guess who holds the knife.
- What you will need
- Four books from the library, a pencil, simple card stock, apple, pear, potato, onion, cranberries, and a printer.
Take the thanksgiving and gratitude unit.
One purchase for the whole unit as a print-ready PDF. No account and no login — it arrives by email, and it is yours to print as often as you like for the children in your own house.
Here it is.
All five days of Apples, yours to print. A copy is on its way to your inbox as well — check the spam folder if it isn’t there in a few minutes.
Start with Monday: cut an apple across the middle instead of down through the stem, and look for the star.