A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is a great introduction to Thanksgiving particularly for EFL students who don’t know a lot about the holiday.

Objectives

• Teach about the American holiday of Thanksgiving
• Discuss traditions and the meaning of Thanksgiving
• Practice understanding videos

Materials

• Video Summary [for the teacher]
• Video Comprehension Questions
• Video of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Warm up: Write on the board: “How we Celebrate”, “History”,”Meaning”,”Related Events”. Ask students what they know about Thanksgiving. Write their contributions in the appropriate categories.
Alternate Procedure Have students come to the board and write their own ideas on the board where they think they fit.
Alternate Procedure Give students 2 minutes to write down whatever comes to mind when they think of Thanksgiving. Then elicit one suggestion at a time from different students and put them on the board.

The goal of this exercise is to elicit vocabulary and get students thinking about Thanksgiving. This will also generate questions and get them articulating what they want to know. On the flip side, foreign students may be surprised at how much they do know about this American holiday.

Introduce the Video: Tell students that you are going to show a video about a funny Thanksgiving. Ask if they know who Charlie Brown is. Then hand out the Video Comprehension Questions and tell students to answer the questions as they watch.
Notes: The video is around 25 minutes long. There’s a fair amount of content that isn’t directly related to Thanksgiving itself and doesn’t really have spoken English. The Video Summary is helpful in deciding whether to skip any parts of the video or not. The introduction in particular might be hard for foreign students. If you choose not to skip it, it’s worth telling them about the Thanksgiving Day football game (assuming that didn’t come out in the beginning) and the running gag in Charlie Brown cartoons that Lucy always tempts Charlie Brown with kicking the football and then pulls it away.
You should also decide whether to stop the film after each scene to give students a chance to answer the questions (and to clarify any problems they might have with comprehension) or if they can handle answering questions as they watch.

When you have finished, go over the answers to the questions and pay particular attention to question 16. Some of the wrong answers are shown in the film but are not Thanksgiving traditions. Once students are clear on the answers to questions 1-16, have them fill out the brief summary of the film.

Post-Film Discussion Ask students what they think of Charlie Brown’s problem. Was Peppermint Patty wrong to invite herself and her friends over? Should Charlie Brown have told them they couldn’t come? What would you do in such a situation? Especially on Thanksgiving? Is it important to have such a holiday? Is there a holiday of thanks in your culture? Is there a holiday with particular traditional foods attached to it?

Extension

• Write a short essay or poem about what you are grateful for.

• Write a scene between an uninvited guest and a host
• Design a holiday of thanks for your country or culture. What day will it be? What will people do to celebrate it? What foods will people eat?

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