In my area, major school districts restrict class parties to three per year. Most of the classroom teachers I know feel that the “winter” party and the “end of the year” party are essential. That leaves one other American holiday available for celebration. Which one will it be? Halloween, Valentine’s Day or Thanksgiving? In some schools, Halloween is a favorite. After all, costumes are fun. Other places, the pleasure of candy and brightly colored envelopes makes Valentine’s Day the winner. Regardless, Thanksgiving is often the loser. And with the pressure of teaching all the curriculum needed for the spring standardized tests, Thanksgiving may not be mentioned in the classroom at all.

Let’s face it: Thanksgiving doesn’t really fit in with a social studies unit on Ancient Greece. So, as a school librarian, I made it a point to read Thanksgiving books to my regularly scheduled classes. But my first November, teaching in a Title I school with a high ELL population, I came home discouraged. The warm stories I read about families eating turkey, stuffing, and cranberries fell totally flat. My students didn’t eat turkey on Thanksgiving. They ate holiday foods from their birth countries. It reminded me of my own childhood. My father was an immigrant from Switzerland. Turkey and pumpkin were American foods he had never experienced before. Growing up, I often didn’t eat traditional American foods on Thanksgiving day, either.

This inspired me to write my picture book Duck for Turkey Day, recently released by Albert Whitman & Co. In Duck for Turkey Day, a little girl named Tuyet is concerned because her family seems to be breaking the “rules” for Thanksgiving. Her Vietnamese-American grandmother explains, “Our family likes duck better.” The book validates the idea of gathering on Thanksgiving Day with ethnic holiday fare, rather than American foods that may not be appealing to immigrant families. However, Tuyet’s depicted experience of learning about Thanksgiving in her classroom is not mirrored in some schools anxious over standardized test scores.

Celebrating holidays in the classroom is not a waste of instructional time for children who are new to the United States. The three-party-a-year-rule may rob ELL students of the opportunity to learn about American life. We need to read culturally meaningful stories at holiday time. And we need to take a break from the required curriculum to celebrate American holidays.

Jacqueline Jules http://www.jacquelinejules.com