On Tuesday I shared ten resources for Thanksgiving-themed lesson plans. This afternoon I discovered another good resource for a Thanksgiving lesson.

The Surprising Origins of Thanksgiving Foods is a new video from It’s Okay to be Smart (a PBS production). Through the video students can learn how the most common, traditional Thanksgiving foods originated and evolved to what they are today. This lesson includes an explanation of how archaeologists and scientists determined that turkeys were one of the first animals to be domesticated in North America. We also learn why the turkeys we find in the grocery store today are so much bigger than those of just a few generations ago.

Try using Vizia to turn this video into an interactive assignment. Vizia is a free tool that lets you build interactive questions into any public YouTube video. Your students responses to your questions appear in a Google Sheet where you can quickly grade answers with the help of Flubaroo. Learn more in my video below.