It’s November already–time to focus on all those things we are grateful for! One thing we at Teacher2Teacher Help are grateful for is YOU! What a year it has been, huh? But you have hung in there and given your best to your students in the most challenging times. On behalf of all the children and families you serve, THANK YOU!
Since it’s November, I thought I’d share some amazing gratitude resources that you can use to teach your students about gratitude this month.
1. Benefits of Teaching Kids to Be Grateful
Did you know that even simple gratitude practices lead to improved physical, psychological, social health? Here is a great article chock-full of gratitude tips and benefits–you might want to share them with your students and their families. Who doesn’t need tips on staying healthier this year?!
2. Gratitude App Makes Focusing on Gratitude Easy and Fun
Do you know about the Gratitude App? It’s a free app that gives you a space in your life to keep track of things you are grateful for. It also gives you daily affirmations and inspiring quotes. My friend shared this app with me and I started using it during quarantine this spring–it really helped me focus on the positives each day. I love the way the journal portion is organized in rainbow colors each day–it brings me joy just opening the app! This resource is more for you than your students, but what better way to teach something so important than by modeling it ourselves.
3. Teach Gratitude Journaling to Kids
Here is a great article from Scholastic called How a Gratitude Journal Can Help Make Your Child Happier. Improve happiness and writing skills at the same time? Can’t go wrong there!
4. Use Writer’s Notebooks to Teach Gratitude
During the spring quarantine, my friend Amy LudwigVanDerwater started an amazing series called Keeping a Notebook on her YouTube channel. All 69 of her videos are amazing and can be used with your students as you teach them the power of keeping a writer’s notebook. Today I want to spotlight video #11 which focuses on gratitude:
5. Teach Gratitude Lessons During Writing Workshop
Another amazing teacher who rocked out some great virtual teaching during spring quarantine was Gwen Blumberg. Like Amy, she has a series of writing minilessons, but this video teaches about gratitude journaling:
Both of these videos would be great ways to launch November notebook writing on people and things we are grateful for. This is real-world writing that goes way beyond the turkey feather Thanksgiving art projects I used to have my students slap together. Both videos are perfect to use as-is with upper elementary students and easy to adapt for primary students.
6. How Being Grateful Can Our Change Lives
The last resource I am sharing is a book called A Simple Act of Gratitude: How Learning to Say Thank You Changed My Life by John Kralik. It’s an inspiring memoir about how the author set a goal to write 365 thank you notes.
While Thanksgiving might look different for many of us this year, one thing is the same–we all have a lot to be grateful for. I hope the above resources will help you and your students focus on gratitude and thanksgiving this month!
