The First Thanksgiving Reader's Theater Ideas & More Thanksgiving Activities

Bring the First Thanksgiving to life by using these interview transcripts as inspiration for Thanksgiving reader’s theater.

Conducted with expert historical interpreters from Plimoth Plantation, these interviews are a creative entry point into life in 1621. Plimoth Plantation is a living museum of 17th-century Plymouth that showcases the Wampanoag People and the Colonial English community in the 1600s.

Get started with these ideas:

• Break each interview into short sections and assign small groups to perform the interviews.
• Have students write a letter as a character portrayed in one of the interviews.
• Use the interviews as research starters and have students write their own original readers theater skits. Then, stage a Thanksgiving play with your students in the roles of the Pilgrims or Native Americans.

Your students can also conduct original research and participate in live chats tomorrow with a present-day Native American and a Pilgrim interpreter representing a young Pilgrim boy from Plimouth Plantation. Join us for one or all of three live chats tomorrow,  Thursday, November 13 at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m. ET. Your class can submit your questions in advance, and then come back tomorrow to ask more questions in real time.

Here are additional lessons, activities, and books to help you teach about Thanksgiving:

• Interactive Timeline of the Journey on the Mayflower (with audio)
• Interactive Tour of the Mayflower (with audio)
• Compare & Contrast Daily Life of the Pilgrims & Native Americans (with audio)
• Interactive Thanksgiving Feast slideshow (with audio)
• Thanksgiving Web Quest
• Plymouth Colony Research Starters
• Letters from a Pilgrim and a Wampanoag Child
• Thanksgiving Lessons
• Thanksgiving Books