28th November

Hello everyone!

We had an interesting class today.

- Revision of homework
- Help with Listening, page 74. (Check page 39 also)
- Page 75, exercise 8. (Group work) We told each other about the most frightening/ exciting experience we have had.
- Thanksgiving handout- "Bet you didn't know quiz" (Check the video here) (see transcript below)
- Adjectives prefix and suffix game

HOMEWORK: Workbook 8C

Happy Thanksgiving!

TRANSCRIPT for Bet you didn't know "Thanksgiving"

We are all familiar with the story of the first Thanksgiving when the Pilgrims invited local Native Americans to share a meal with them. But we bet you didn’t know Thanksgiving didn’t become an annual tradition until more than two hundred years later.

That first Thanksgiving in 1621 wasn’t just one big meal; it was a three-day festival of eating, hunting and other entertainments in honor of the Pilgrim’s first successful harvest. The Indians killed five deer as gifts for the colonists, so venison was definitely on the first Thanksgiving menu. But we bet you didn’t know that turkey was not! They also didn’t have pumpkin pie or potatoes, which haven’t been introduced to New England yet and while they may have eaten cranberries, they would have been served plain, not in a sauce or relish.

The pilgrims didn’t plan on starting a Thanksgiving tradition. In fact, they didn’t repeat the November celebration in subsequent years. In 1789, President George Washington announced the first ever National Thanksgiving Holiday, which took place on Thursday November 26^th, but it didn’t become an annual tradition nationwide until the nineteenth century.

That’s when an American writer named Sara Josepha Hale, most famous for writing the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb”, was inspired by “Diary of Pilgrim life” to recreate that first Thanksgiving feast. Beginning in 1827, Hale weighed a nearly thirty-year campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She also published recipes for pumpkin pie; turkey and stuffing. That probably didn’t appear on the Pilgrims’ plates but would become the staples of modern Thanksgiving meals.

In 1863, in the mist of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln announced that the nation would celebrate Thanksgiving every year on the final Thursday in November. But did you know in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to move the holiday up a week to give the US retailers more time to make money during the Christmas shopping season? The move was widely criticized and in 1941, FDR signed a bill fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November, where it stays today.

One of the corkiest Thanksgiving traditions began in 1989 when President George H.W. Bush granted the first official pardon to a Turkey. Every November since then, the current Oval Office occupant has given a retreat to one or two turkeys sending them into retirement on a farm rather than to a dinner table. Though it only began in the late twentieth century, the story has become one of the more unusual chapters on the long history of Thanksgiving traditions.