Book Review: Two-List Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a very American and Canadian holiday, but people from other countries who live in these countries now also like to celebrate the holiday. It just might look a little different in their households.

Two-List Thanksgiving by Christine Whan and illustrated bur Sienna Youngsun Kim, tells the story of a Korean-American family getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving with their American and Korean family members.

The two lists of the title are for grocery shopping: one list for the American grocery store to get traditional American Thanksgiving foods and one for the Korean market. Mom and daughter go shopping then prepare all the foods for their feast.

Some of the ingredients are the same for both kinds of food, such as carrots used in stuffing and japchae (a noodle stir fry). But the carrots are prepared differently in each dish so they taste different.

In the end the big extended families get together and have what would sound like a normal Thanksgiving to most readers. There’s football watching and cooking, kids playing and grandparents drinking tea. They enjoy turkey and galbi (beef short ribs) and other classic Korean and American foods. (And of course there’s a joke about American grandpa trying kimchi.)

They pass around a candle and all share special things they are thankful for, and the girl realizes all her relatives are actually one family.

The author notes that she grew up having holiday meals just like this one, combining her family’s traditional foods with the usual foods of their new home.

The book is a sweet story about different cultures coming together and captures that feeling of building a new family on the traditions of the past. It also includes recipes for japchae and stuffing if you want to try mixing food cultures for your holiday feast!

This would be a nice one for a multicultural classroom or to read at home to talk about the different ways people celebrate holidays.

About the book: 40 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Beaming Books. Suggested retail price $19.99.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply