With Thanksgiving just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to incorporate some techy twists into any holiday-themed plans. I love sharing seasonal content on the blog and podcast, and today, I have a handful of Thanksgiving school projects to share with you.
What I love about this time of year is that it offers a reminder for us to pause and give thanks. Even if students don’t observe Thanksgiving, these projects offer an opportunity after the first few months of school to strengthen connections in your classroom community. It’s a great addition to a formal social-emotional learning curriculum or a way to connect your traditional content with the season.
A Techy Twist on Thanksgiving Projects
You don’t need to have a formal gratitude practice in your classroom to carve out time for everyone to say thanks. Thanksgiving projects provide everyone with an opportunity to reflect on the first few months of the school year and share some things or people they are grateful for. Although the Thanksgiving school projects I mention below aren’t specific to one content area, there are oodles of ways you can customize each one.
Interested in more Thanksgiving ideas? Here are a few more posts with a seasonal connection:
- 8 Fall Activities for Kids With a Digital Spin
- 14 Favorite Thanksgiving Books + Thanksgiving eBooks for Today’s Readers
- 3 Thanksgiving Lesson Ideas for Reading Classrooms
7 Thanksgiving School Projects
How might you use the ideas on this list? In a science classroom, students can explore the history of harvest festivals. In social studies, they can learn about the cultural significance of Thanksgiving. Math projects might include creating graphs of favorite Thanksgiving foods, and English Language Arts projects might involve writing thank you letters. Here are a few ideas to get your wheels spinning!
Create a Carousel
If you’ve joined me for a workshop on creativity in the classroom, you know this is a favorite project. For a Thanksgiving spin, have students create a social media-style carousel post showing things they are thankful for. This can be done using tools like Canva or Google Slides.
What is a carousel post? It combines a few different graphics together to make a slideshow, and students can add something new to each graphic, such as one thing they are thankful for. Here is a template I made in Canva that you can use yourself or share with students.
Set up a Scene
Kids can use a student-friendly AI image generation tool to create an image of something they are thankful for. One option is the text-to-image feature in Adobe Express. They can describe the image they want to create in a sentence or two. Then, they can add their image to a graphic and share it with their classmates or family.
Gratitude Journal
Students can keep a digital gratitude journal throughout the school year or maybe start one during the Thanksgiving season. They can use a tool like Google Docs or a journaling platform like Book Creator to capture their thoughts. You might remember my conversation on the podcast with Book Creator CEO Lainey Franks all about using digital spaces to create inclusive classrooms.
Write a Song
Earlier this year on the blog, I featured some ways to make music with AI. You might ask students to write a song about the season. Some of these tools aren’t designed for student use, so you might model how to write a prompt and ask students to submit ideas. Then you can generate the music and share it with them.
Conduct an Interview
Students can interview someone they are thankful for as a way of spotlighting and celebrating how they have helped them this year. Encourage students to interview someone they are thankful for. There are lots of tools for podcasting, but one I’ve played around with this year and really like is Adobe Podcast. It allows you to edit and share the audio and even quickly access the transcript.
Thank You Videos
Students can create a gratitude video montage with clips collected from their peers. They might interview their classmates and then stitch the videos together using Apple’s Clips, iMovie, or another favorite video tool. There are lots of structures for this type of activity, and it’s a great option for building community.
Thanksgiving Facts
I love infographics, and you might give students an opportunity to create seasonal infographics. This is a great option when choosing Thanksgiving school projects to bring to your students. Kids can collect survey data, or you can share a data set with them. Then, they can make their own infographics to display the data.
When deciding on Thanksgiving school projects, there are plenty to choose from! And of course adding a techy twist provides a fantastic way to engage students and bring new life to traditional classroom activities.
For more tech-friendly strategies that you can use anytime of the year, check out my book EdTech Essentials: 12 Strategies for Every Classroom in the Age of AI, 2nd Edition. Whether you’re looking for new ideas or tried-and-true methods, this book is packed with practical tips and insights. And if you already have a copy, don’t forget to download the free study guide to enhance your learning experience.