The internet has made finding realia so much easier. It’s pretty easy to pluck an authentic news story or find a relevant video clip from YouTube. But with the holidays around the corner and all of the traditional food that Americans eat on Thanksgiving and Christmas, it might be time to bring in some more interesting realia: food!

If you have pumpkin in your area, you can make pumpkin pie.  Or pumpkin cookies like in the picture above, since, in case you didn’t know, no one eats pumpkin outside the US. Students will love to try it! And many will think it is disgusting, so it can be pretty funny. You can integrate these food items into your curriculum in many ways. You could bring it in and have it be the start of a conversation or a discussion. If you’re in another country, you could have a debate about if local stores should sell American food.

You could also have your students make the food in class. This could be good practice for following directions if you have one student dictate the recipe to another who isn’t allowed to read it. It could even be a listening activity if you have a high tech classroom and access to videos from foodnetwork.com or marthastewart.com

Other classic American foods include: scrambled eggs, pancakes, cookies, fruit salad with marshmallows (ambrosia),  meatloaf and more. This activity is totally optional and might just be something you add to a end of class party. But food can be a fun realia in the classroom. So give it a try and don’t be afraid to bring in things that you think taste bad. Some people might like them.

At my house, we begin every Thanksgiving meal the same way. Everyone at the table has to say one thing that they are thankful for. It usually goes something like this:

“I am thankful for the food.”

“I am thankful for being alive.”

“I am thankful for having wonderful family.”

“I am thankful for work.”

And on it goes. It takes a while to go around the Thanksgiving table. We usually have fifteen people for dinner and each person must say something unique.

But I realized I could do something like this in my ESL class to teach Gerund as well as the real meaning of Thanksgiving. (Believe it or not Thanksgiving isn’t all about food.) Gerunds look like verbs, for example being, but they act like nouns. So in our “I am thankful for…” examples we have two gerunds. We can see from the examples that gerunds are in the same place as nouns and that they really do act like nouns.

So you might want to use the “I am thankful for…” as an introduction or as practice in your next gerund lesson.  Students could even use this as a writing prompt. It will bring in a little bit of culture and a little bit of fun to a traditionally boring grammar topic.

More on gerunds here: Gerund Summary with lots of quizzes, Printable Gerund Board Game, and more Gerund Quizzes

This thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, a holiday on which people get together with family and friends for a big meal and give thanks for all the good things in their lives.

Lots of cultures have a similar holiday. The generally accepted story behind ours is that a small group of Europeans known as the pilgrims came to North America in 1621 and almost starved during their first winter. They were helped by the local Indian population. So, when the harvest was good the following year, they had a big feast with the Indians to celebrate both the good harvest and their survival of the previous winter.

In October, we taped a lesson on Thanksgiving, but when I went to edit it and put it on English, baby!, I discovered it probably wouldn’t make for a very good lesson. We taped it near the end of the day and we gotten really silly by then. When Devan asked Beren to explain the story of Thanksgiving, she told a whole bunch of lies!

Take a listen to the audio if you want to hear something funny. Everyone burst out laughing after the recorder had stopped. Beren says that the pilgrims arrived in 1892 and were asked to pardon a turkey by the local Indians, which is why the president pardons a turkey every year. Then the pilgrims died, so the holiday is to remember the pilgrims. Pretty funny stuff, but too confusing for an ESL lesson. If you want to know more about the real Thanksgiving story, click here.

Anyway, I thought Beren’s  improv skills were pretty good there. I’m not sure if I could come up with an alternate Thanksgiving story on the spot like that!