Many Thanks

Spanish

 Ojibwe

Chinese (also a Korean celebration)

Mohawk

These are some of the books I have shared with my second grade students. We talked about how people of many cultures and religions give thanks at different times of the year. In these books we saw that people may give thanks on any day too, not just on holidays. We talked about things that we are thankful for and we also learned how to say thank you in other languages like Ojibwe and Spanish. Then, we found out that some of the students in our school know how to say thank you in even more languages including sign language. Some of our students became teachers. One class learned how to say thank you in Albanian and all of the classes learned how to say thank you in Hmong. It was so cool to see students that know more than one language get to proudly teach everyone else and be the experts.

Another cool thing was having a student rush up to me the first thing in the morning to give me a list of  ways to say thank you in Hmong. She had checked with her grandmother the night before because she knew there were other ways to say it besides the one she taught us. She also wanted to make sure we were spelling it correctly. A bonus was with her list of thank yous she had written titles of her favorite books. I loved seeing her excitement.

We are working on making a video of us practicing our new ways of saying thank you. These lessons have been a great learning time for all of us. 

miigwech (Ojibwe) - gracias (Spanish) - ua tsaug (Hmong)

 faliminderit (Albanian)  kamsa hamnida (Korean)