November is considered National Aviation Month, and some public schools observe it to teach the history of aviation in the U.S. NASA calls November Exploration Month. For history lessons, you can teach students about two or three important figures in aviation history. Whether you choose to teach about Orville and Wilbur Wright and their first successful flight or Amelia Earhart and her desire to fly as the first female pilot, you can employ puzzles, cartoons and pictures as tools to aid in your teaching. Create an aviation alphabet beginning with A for airplane and B for balloon. Let students give input on each letter, but have a list ready in case they get stumped.
November 1 is both National Author’s Day and National Family Literacy Day. Read to students from classic children’s books. Encourage students to read at home by recommending a book for parents to read to them. Use a wordless book, which is a regular illustrated children's book but without the words below explaining the action. Encourage each student to make up her own story based on the pictures and be an author for a day.
November 4 is National Candy Day. Read "Julius’s Candy Corn" by Kevin Henkes to the students. Have them count the pieces of candy corn on each page for a counting exercise. With parental consent, pass out candy corn pieces and have the students count them. Create a candy alphabet with each letter standing for some type of candy: for example, B for butterscotch and C for chocolate.
November 11 is Veterans Day. It is a day to honor the living servicemen and servicewomen in the military. Teaching the students the Pledge of Allegiance would be a good goal throughout the month of November. Teaching the students about what a soldier or sailor does and what the difference is between them is another idea. Teach the students about the American flag, have them count the stars, the red stripes and the white stripes. Tell them what each stands for.
The last Thursday in November is, of course, Thanksgiving. Many images are closely associated with Thanksgiving, including pilgrims, Indians, horns of plenty and turkeys. For preschoolers just learning the alphabet, a Thanksgiving alphabet exercise may be a little challenging so add harvesting and farming terms to make it easier. The Thanksgiving alphabet is a list of related items with pictures, as in P for pilgrim and T for turkey. Themes in Thanksgiving can include work, which the Pilgrims had to do to harvest so much food. The themes can include sharing, which the Pilgrims did with the American Indians when they harvested a lot of food.