just me wrote:For harvest, I think of my kids' preschool teacher who would ask each child to bring a food to be part of their feast (no penalty if you can't). I would imagine lessons about agriculture and animal husbandry, sharing bounty, visiting farms, hayrides. For older kids, learning how to preserve food is a great science experience.
Did you say preschool?
I was hoping that you would include science as part of the curriculum. :-) I always wrote my own curriculum, largely having to do with nature, so I'm on board with what you are saying here. There are so many ways to bring a class through the year in meaningful ways without celebrating specific holidays and I think there are good reasons not to celebrate specific holidays. I'll mention those later.
One of the best years I ever had teaching was when we started our long term garden project. I could attach experiences to that garden that included math, science inquiry, art, literacy, large/small motor development, writing practice, dramatic play. The garden went through the year with us until it was time to plant again. We grew our own pumpkins and veggies, and cooked those for a feast with families and made pizza for each other.
Out of that garden came exposure to the art of Dale Chihuly, art experiences involving food and flowers, scientific inquiry/observation/prediction/photographic documentation, graphing apples, worms/compost, dissecting pumpkins...cooking the seeds, planting seeds, cooking the pumpkin, hammering golf tees into pumpkins ( can get more mileage out of one pumpkin or an apple!) with real hammers, pumpkin stem painting, sign up sheets that require name writing practice, well, I could go on but I'll spare you!
Here's an experiment: Ziploc bag, dirt, unpopped popcorn, water. In the Ziploc, sprinkle dirt, kernels of unpopped popcorn, and lightly water. Close the Ziploc, squeeze the ingredients to mix them, put it on a shelf, and watch what happens in about a week's time. :-) Do not open the bag. It's going to open itself. ;)
There are good children's books about the historical Thanksgiving, however, they're incomplete in telling the whole story, particularly from the perspective of Native Americans. Over the years, I've chosen to discard that as part of my curriculum and instead, focus on typical curriculum components using nature as a focal point.
For wintertime, eh, hadn't given it much thought. But using snowflakes and footballs in counting rather than Santa. Teaching about the cycles of the moon and sun, hibernation and how animals deal with harsh weather, migration patterns. I'd focus a party on the theme that during the winter family and friends like to come together to visit and it's a time where many help those in need. I'd do food drives, coat drives and that kind of thing so that the children could actively participate in helping their community.
I like trees as an underlying curriculum thread. You can start in early fall and take it right through the school year to include life cycle, recycling, the forest ecosystem...animal habitat, what trees contribute to humans, and when you get to winter, just as you said, how animals behave in winter and why. Ice and snow melting, freeze/melt, painting with icicles, winter sports (Ice hockey in the classroom!), measuring snow fall, blowing frozen bubbles, the effect of salt on a block of ice, polar animals, do penguins and polar bears know each other outside of a zoo? ;-) Photographing animal footprints in the snow with a digital camera and trying to identify them. Name writing in snow. :-D I could go on...I won't!
I'm not fond of celebrating holidays in an early childhood classroom. A couple or three reasons for that. I've taught and/or aided in schools (preschool/elem) where holidays were celebrated and where they were not. When winter holidays were celebrated, I always felt that I couldn't do justice to Hannukah or Kwanzaa, and that we only gave a superficial treatment to those. I think the best experiences were when parents came to class and shared their traditions with us. I felt that benefitted my classroom community far more in terms of sharing diversity than most anything I could have taught myself.
I also dislike that children, who are already being hurried through the holiday season, were confronted with more of the same in school. No one is getting enough sleep and everyone is on overload. I liked the years where we shut out the outside world and had class as usual just as much as when we celebrated, if not more.
I also disliked that in some cases, all of our classroom books for Christmas had to do with Santa instead of the birth of Christ. That puts me in conflict on several levels. Do I present the birth of Christ? Do I present Santa? Who will I offend? If I try to cover Hannukah and Kwanzaa, am I stereotyping someone and not getting to the heart of the traditions? That's why the sharing of family traditions always seemed the best and most valuable way to go, and when children ask to sing a song...just sing it!
I love your idea about food drives! My classrooms often had a mitten tree in winter!
Okay, enough of my rambling and shop talk!
:-)
I never dressed up as a Pilgrim or Indian. I did dress as a Russian acrobat once, but that wasn't part of school. It was part of acrobatics class my mom signed me up for. I really enjoyed it. 
