Caitie is sharing helpful tips for learning in the classroom or at home using the song I’m Thankful from Super Simple Songs! She sings the song and shows us gestures for the key vocabulary words, too! This a great song to teach little ones about gratitude and to practice the vocabulary, “thank you”.
Try these ideas in the classroom or at home!
- This song is a great introduction to teaching the meaning of gratitude. Ask your students what they feel thankful for, and see what they come up with.
- You can also talk about the different ways we can show our gratitude, not only to the people around us but also to our environment. In the song, we sing about being thankful for the bird and the trees, so have a conversation with your students about how we can show gratitude for those things in nature, too.
- Once you’ve discussed the different things you are thankful you can make a thankful pie craft as a class. This is a great activity for the week of Thanksgiving when those who celebrate consider the things they’re grateful for and there’s usually pie involved too. Come up with a few things you are grateful for as a class and put them into your pie craft. Then you can move the pie each day to reveal another thing your class is thankful for and you can have a further discussion on the topic.
- You can also have each of your students make a thankful collage. Have them cut out pictures of things they’re thankful for from magazines or photos and glue them to a piece of paper to make a special artwork of gratitude. They can present their artwork to the class and explain the different things they chose to include.
- Another fun activity is Thanksgiving Bingo! You can use our printable or make your own game cards by adding in your own images into each box. You can either play as a class or give each student a game card so they can play on their own. The goal is to spot the things in real life, kind of like a scavenger hunt, and to mark it off once it’s been found. You can work towards four in a row, or cover the whole game board. This is a nice activity to encourage little ones to be on the lookout for the things they should feel grateful for and to recognize those things when they see them.
- For older students who can write, encourage them to write a letter to someone they want to say thank you to. It can be for someone they feel grateful for, or for a specific thing that a person did for them, just be sure they include those important words, thank you.
More resources for this song (1)
