Our Kindergarten Friendship Feast

Why a Friendship Feast?

It can be tricky to know how best to approach Thanksgiving due to its complicated history.  I decided to have a friendship feast with a focus on relationships, since building strong relationships is the mission of the Positivity Project.

I began by introducing the word “unity” as joining together.  We looked at how the Pilgrims and Native Americans, two very different groups of people, joined together to make and share food on the first Thanksgiving.

I told the children that as a symbol of this unity, we would make a friendship fruit salad and that the different fruits would stand for the different people coming together to make something really great!

Making Friendship Fruit Salad

We began by making a list of possible fruits the children might bring.  They chose a few of their favorites and drew them on the family letter we sent home.

On the day of the feast, I showed children the bowl that we would use for our fruit salad and asked them to name the shape.  I explained that a circle is a symbol of unity.  We passed the bowl around our circle and each child put their fruit inside.

The children worked on their book,  Let’s Make Friendship Fruit Salad, while I washed and cut the fruit.  I called them over in pairs to help cut the bananas.

Once the salad was complete, each child took a turn mixing the fruit.

Enjoying our Friendship Feast

We then joined together to eat the “fruits” of our labor!  The children helped set our tables with the placemats that we made along with bowls, plates, and spoons. Our “feast” also included corn muffins and honey that was brought in by a student as a sign of fall.

Making a Friendship Wreath

The next day, I told the children that there was more to the story of the Pilgrims and Native Americans.  I drew a circle on the board.  I said that the opposite of unity, was to be divided or broken apart and drew a line down the center of the circle.  I explained that after the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and Native Americans didn’t always get along.  We talked about ways that we don’t always get along in our classroom and how our circle sometimes gets broken too.

We made a friendship unity wreath to remind us to keep our circle together.  It’s the first thing we see when we enter our classroom each morning!

Do you find this holiday tricky as well? How do you approach it in your classroom?  All of the above ideas are included in the Friendship Fruit Salad resource.

UPDATE: This year we are doing a Friendsgiving Celebration where we will make friendship soup,

build a friendly scarecrow, do the friendship pokey and more.  

This clickable Google Slide will be used to display a Friendsgiving backdrop that allows us to easily access the digital links for fun activities, books, and songs that teach about friendship.