Pictured are Bush Elementary students showing off their Thanksgiving Turkey artwork. P-J photos by Katrina Fuller

“Do you want to know what they had the first Thanksgiving in 1621?” Sydney Deppas asked her class at Bush Elementary School in Jamestown. “Fish!”

Deppas’ class focused this week on learning about the first Thanksgiving held by the pilgrims in the 1600s. Students were able to experience writing with a feather pen, hunting and learning about some of the foods like fish and shellfish that diners on the first Thanksgiving would have eaten.

On Tuesday morning, the students had their own Thanksgiving “feast” featuring their handmade Thanksgiving placemats. However, the students started their snacking with donuts — not seafood.

“We’ve been learning about pilgrims, so yesterday we did ‘pilgrim’ centers and in those centers, they wrote with a feather and tried to make letters,” Deppas said as she passed out donuts. “They also tried to make pumpkin pie using some unique ingredients.

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They also did hunting where they had to walk around the classroom to find animals and write down the animal. The biggest key for them was to embrace this season of Thanksgiving and what it meant, and understand the difference between the first Thanksgiving to now.”

She said she wanted to incorporate some of these lessons so the students would understand the difference between what is celebrated today, and what the first celebration was like.

“It was just a cool, immersive experience,” Deppas said. “It was some of the stuff I did in school, and I really wanted to bring it to now because you don’t see it a lot anymore. With COVID, it made it a little trickier, but that wouldn’t stop us — we still got to do the fun stuff.”

Students were also asked to guess what kind of vegetables pilgrims would have eaten and what would be eaten at a typical Thanksgiving meal now. Answers such as lemons, potatoes and more were given as students raised their hands in vegetable-naming excitement. Deppas also explained that pilgrims would have had to hunt or fish for whatever meat they would’ve consumed.

“You had to hunt, right?” She asked. “What is one of the easiest animals to catch in the wild? You had to fish – fishing was something the pilgrims did so frequently that that’s what they had for their first Thanksgiving.”