Navigating Fall Holidays

Rebecca Nagle reminded me that it was suddenly fall and a perfect time to share resources and reminders for the upcoming holidays. Her tweet thread explains it beautifully and shares helpful resources. Our blog posts below share different strategies and ideas for addressing Columbus Day (Indigenous Peoples Day), Halloween, and Thanksgiving in the classroom. 

We taught these lessons with elementary school students (3rd or 5th grade), but they can easily be adapted for older learners.

Columbus Day (Indigenous Peoples Day): October 12th

Unfortunately, Columbus Day is still a federal holiday, although more and more communities have voted to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead. We facilitated Columbus Day Debates with our students one year and led a Holiday Inquiry: Columbus Day another year. If you choose to have a similar debate in your classroom, make sure you have time for debrief and a more general conversation about critical literacy and historical narrative. The holiday inquiry post also shares how we celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day in our classroom.

Halloween: October 31st

Halloween is already a lot for elementary school teachers without adding racist or appropriative costumes to the mix. We found it really helpful to talk to students beforehand and share notes from our conversation with families so everyone knew what the expectations around costumes were before they got around to bringing anything to school. Prevention and preparation are key for Halloween! We also loved having our students investigate and analyze different commercial costumes and share out what they noticed. Read more at Holiday Investigations : Halloween! 

Thanksgiving: November 24th

Here are some Gratitude Activities We Love and Thanksgiving & Native American Heritage Month Resources & Reminders. The second post includes general tips to keep in mind when looking for resources about Native Americans, as well as some of our ideas for addressing Thanksgiving in our 3rd grade class that year. 

We also wrote this post earlier this school year to help frame your thinking as you choose books or other resources for your classrooms (and yourselves!): Choosing Nonfiction Resources Critically.

Happy October!

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Holiday Investigations : Halloween!

Hallo again! (see what we did there? Nina says this wasn’t my finest). Yours truly were there, and they're (their was also a costume but is not pictured). Of course we can all have a reminder about homophones on Halloween! 

It was just recently Halloween in 5th grade and we wanted to share one of our favorite parts of prepping for the holiday. 

In 5th grade since we are constantly examining systems and institutions, we examine many holidays throughout the year and Halloween is no exception! 

Halloween is a jackpot for discussing stereotypes, cultural appropriation, gender norms, “trends” and media. In short, we LOVE it as a way to inspire even more social justice conversations. 

We do an investigation into Halloween in which students are broken into four groups: “boys" costumes, "girls" costumes, cultural/international costumes, and "women’s" costumes.  

We have either found appropriate pages that work for us or we create our own. For example, for the cultural/international costumes page, we created a google doc with a bunch of images we pulled from Halloween costumes websites. We are sure to leave in details like “Sold Out!” so that students can see the level of demand for certain costumes. 

Students then use a tracking sheet with their group mates to collect data about the costumes on the page assigned to their group. They collect information about what gender they perceive the person to be, details about the poses, colors, whether or not the model presents as a person of color or not etc. We also give them a space to add other notes. 

After collecting all of this data we ask students to look for trends. What patterns did they notice? “Skirts, skirts, and MORE Skirts!” said our group looking at the “girls” costumes. And then we discuss. Each group shares out their data/trends and we talk about overall findings. 

Some of the thoughts the 5th graders had were: 
On girly costumes: "I wouldn’t want to wear any of them! It was sexist" (They also noted Coach Arca wouldn't let any of the girls step onto her basketball court in high heels!) 

They also asked some important questions like, "Why would you say someone else’s culture is silly?" and "Isn't it really weird to put on someone else’s skin?" "Not all rappers are the same - why would they say/think they are? These questions ended with a comment in which one student said, "It is starting to seem like costumes are just made up of stereotypes.."

We also reflect on what we think about when we choose costumes? What is Halloween about for us personally? 

We are sure to do this investigation BEFORE the big day so that students can transfer this type of thinking to their own costume choice. 

And here we are— on Halloween! Excited, dressed up silly, expressing ourselves respectfully and with joy. We also celebrated our poetry on Halloween with a publishing party in the afternoon. All in all, a great build up and actual Halloween. 

We love having fun with the holiday, and we LOVE using holidays and investigation as a way of doing some critical thinking and in depth observation of systems and stereotypes we have in place. 

Happy (belated) Halloween! 

Let us know how you investigate holidays in your classroom! How do you take on Halloween? 

Below are some images from our investigation: 

Pocahontas Investigation!

In our classroom we have a Social Studies unit focused on Virginia's (and Maryland's) Indigenous people. This unit developed after we noticed that our students had no idea about the people, cultures, and communities that have been on this land for thousands of years.

One part of this unit that we are just getting into is an investigation about the one and only Pocahontas. She is from a tribe in the Virginia area, called the Pamunkey (part of the Powhatan Confederacy) and thus is very relevant. She also was a source of great interest to our students-- so we went with it!

Investigations are a great way to get students (or anyone!) invested in a conversation, and gives the space for everyone to get some more background information before taking on a heavier or more dynamic conversation.

Our Pocahontas Investigation was structured by having small groups (3-4 students) doing what is typically called a jigsaw format. Each group received multiple resources.

The resources were things like:

• letter from the Powhatan nation about Pocahontas
• lyrics from a song in the Disney movie (we used the first verse and chorus of the song Savages)
• images of her from different sources
• news articles
• a Brainpop video

Each group received a worksheet to track what they were thinking/finding from their resources. Students had multiple time warnings, including a heads up of when to begin to organize what they want to share with the larger group. Finally, each group shared their conclusions.

Here are some of our students’ reflections from this investigation:

• You need to look at multiple resources that take on multiple perspectives in order to fully understand a story

• The Pocahontas story we learned from Disney is not historically accurate. (See the image above: our students were astounded that Pocahontas was talking to a willow tree when willow trees were not yet in North America!)

• The stereotype of Native Americans/ American Indians/ Indigenous people being 'savages' and 'uncivilized' is in so much of our media. We know from our study of some awful American history along with our modern day work that this is a troubling stereotype we need to continue to counter.

• Images and language around Pocahontas and other Indigenous American people continue to be demeaning*, showing them as not counting as 'human' which we think might connect to the way they were treated.. thinking about extermination, boarding schools, reservations and even land allocation and broken treaties today.

• Harmful stereotypes about anyone hurt all of us.  As one student put it, "almost of the things through history that are bad all have to do with stereotypes like women being weak."

*Our class has had multiple dynamic (and far from unanimous!) conversations about mascots as one present day way students shared that they see 'Native American people'. It was awesome to see and hear them come back around to that!

 Let us know if you do anything similar or give this type of format a try! Also, please feel free to ask clarifying questions below. We aren't always sure exactly how many details to share and would be happy to explain more if need be!

Stay tuned for more updates from our classroom!