Thanksgiving in Spanish class – lista lunes

If you want to skip Thanksgiving and instead showcase the diversity of the Indigenous People of the Spanish-speaking world, check out this new music resource. In particular, you could use one song per day or a music bracket for Native American Heritage Month in November.

The included diverse music celebrates the Indigenous People of Latin America. These songs for any Spanish class acknowledge the original people of the land that now speaks Spanish. The majority of the songs are in Spanish from Indigenous musical artists, plus these slides include songs or parts of songs in Emberá, Kaqchikel, Garífuna, Quechua, Tzotzil, Zapoteco, Mapudungun, Tz’utujil, and Nahuatl.

Every year for the month of November, we make a thankful turkey bulletin board. It is very easy and you can see the instructions here.

It is a great way to get in repetitions of  the high frequency phrase “give.” Students write “I give thanks for” on their traced hand with five things they are thankful for. As students are working, the teacher asks individual students “what do you give thanks for?” and then states “s/he gives thanks for.” Finally, the whole class can come together to say “we give thanks for” items in common. We made a running list on the board of common things that people are thankful for in Spanish, which is a natural and personalized way to bring up family vocabulary and other things are important in students’ lives.

After personalized questions and answers related to giving thanks from the bulletin board above, students could do a little writing about what they are thankful for in Spanish. This is the perfect mini writing assessment to complete right before Thanksgiving. It allows students to reflect on what they are thankful for and write about it in Spanish. You can find it here with three separate rubric versions.