Last year on Thanksgiving I discovered an ESRI Storymap titled Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? Of course, having discovered it on Thanksgiving Day it was a bit too late to be useful so I’m sharing it again this year in advance of Thanksgiving.

Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? displays where eight popular Thanksgiving foods are grown and harvested in the United States. The storymap includes a map for each ingredient. Each map shows the locations of commercial producers. Fun facts are included in the storymap too. For example, did you know that Illinois has at least twice as many acres of pumpkins as any state?

Applications for Education

You could use the Thanksgiving meal storymap to spark students’ curiosity to investigate questions like “why does Illinois grow so many pumpkins?” or “why don’t we harvest any pecans in New England?”