This is the same style of lesson as the
Hallowe'en on that I posted; introduce vocabulary, watch a south park video, do an activity.
Thanksgiving:
- Native Speaker gives students a pop quiz on Thanksgiving. 10 minutes.
- Native Speaker goes over the pop quiz. 5 minutes.
- Native Speaker demonstrates Thanksgiving by playing South Park Video. 20 minutes.
- Students perform Crossword worksheet. 10 minutes.
- Native Speakers goes over Crossword worksheet. 5 minutes.
Notes:
- I assumed that the kids would have some exposure to Thanksgiving so I expected them to have no problem with the Thanksgiving Questions worksheet; the smart students managed to get a phrase or two for each question (“thank god, eat chicken”) but others just looked at me with dumbfounded expressions.
- Like the Hallowe’en lesson I gave all of the students the answers for the crossword via the pop quiz.
- Pilgrims and Indians were a tough concepts for the kids to understand. The first European immigrants was the closest non-Korea way of explaining it. I tried to stress that Native American is more appropriate but I think that it went over most of their heads?
- There's almost too much work in this lesson so the timing of this class can go wrong if the kids are slow. I just end the worksheets early instead of blatantly skipping South Park.
- Some teachers use South Park episode as filler, but here it works incredibly well since it follows the kids during one of their “School Festival” for Thanksgiving. It also helps identify the difference between a chicken and turkey.
I used South Park EP4-14 Helen Keller, the Musical. You can get it from
Pandora.tv but thanks to the good people over at
SouthParkZone and
SPKor you can download the
video and download the
subtitles. Using the SPKor subtitles gives a higher quality experience and reduces any weirdness that you get from pandora.tv advertisements.
More information about my lessons can be found
here.