FHE: The Thanksgiving Story

It occurred to me yesterday that I've been talking to my boys about Thanksgiving for the last week and they have no idea what I'm talking about. I have failed to tell them the Thanksgiving story. They know they are supposed to be thankful, and have been awesome at helping me come up with things that we are thankful for each day. But they don't know why. They don't know how Thanksgiving started in the first place. So, I used last night's FHE lesson to redeem myself. :)

I found the cutest pattern online for spoon Pilgrims. They were super easy to make too. I just printed out the pattern, traced it onto construction paper, glued/taped it onto spoons, and put some googly eyes and little pom noses on them. Then I thought to myself, it wouldn't be very hard to alter the patterns slightly to make Indians. Then we could act out the whole Thanksgiving story. So that's what I did.

We did a really simple version of the story that went something like this:

"Once there were people called pilgrims. They lived in England a land that is very far away from here. People in England weren't being nice to the pilgrims, so the pilgrims got on a boat and sailed a long long way to a land called America. America is where we live. When the pilgrims got to America they wanted to start building homes and planting seeds for food, but they needed help. The people that already lived here were called Indians, or Lamanites (ya, had to throw that in there) they already knew how to grow food on the land, so they helped the pilgrims to grow food. When the food was done growing, they harvested it, that means they got it ready to eat. And the pilgrims and Indians sat down together to have a big dinner because they were so thankful that they had food to eat. They called this dinner Thanksgiving. And today we still celebrate Thanksgiving, because we are thankful to Heavenly Father for all the things he's given us."

Then we decided to let the kids act out the story. Aaron put the kids in the laundry basket and had them sail across the "ocean" (blue blanket spread out on the floor) to America. And we retold the story that way. Then the kids wanted to use the spoon puppets while I retold the story. And after one show that was about the end of the spoon puppets. :) They weren't the most durable play thing we've ever owned, but I think they did a pretty good job of getting the story across.

Here are the boys crossing the ocean. You can see Ivan holding on to his pilgrim for dear life.