Thanksgiving in December

The lesson plan well seems to have run dry as of late, so I've spent most of this week anachronistically teaching a Thanksgiving lesson to my younger students. Well, how could I teach little kids about Thanksgiving without that staple of American kindergarten education: the hand turkey? The answer is, I couldn't. So a few dozen young Momoishians were able to make their first hand turkeys this week.

While most Japanese children have a familiarity with Christmas and Halloween through holiday merchandizing (which is, literally, as inescapable here as it is in the US), Thanksgiving is a completely different story. Even though there is inexplicably a Japanese word for Thanksgiving (感謝祭), none of my kids had any idea what it was. Then, when I drew a cooked turkey on the board and asked what it was, most of them replied that it was either pork or chicken (and one kid shouted out "Lion!"). After explaining to them that it was a turkey (七面鳥), I was met with mostly disgusted looks. You see, turkey isn't eaten in Japan and aside from books of exotic animals, I'm assuming that most Japanese have never even seen a turkey before.

So, it should come as no surprise that when I asked them to draw hand turkeys, the results were quite interesting. Most kids chose to depict it as a mythical beast the likes of which Odysseus might have faced; 30-feet tall, plumed in neon feathers and able to snap a tree in half with a single peck. The same kid who yelled out "lion," drew his with an extra head. As a matter of fact, it was an extra lion's head. I suspect that he really likes lions.