Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. As seen in most elementary schools, one would never guess that, however. Small children parade up and down the hallways in feather headdresses and construction paper hats with buckles. They trace their hands to make turkeys and color pictures of the Mayflower. The story we teach them is straightforward as well. Unfortunately, it's inaccurate. Very little of what we do in elementary schools regarding Thanksgiving is accurate.

We give credit to Pilgrims in New England with celebrating the first Thanksgiving in 1621. However, there were documented celebrations of thanksgiving in many other areas prior to this and likely many for which we have no documentation. Pilgrim children did not wear hats with buckles on them and Native Americans in New England did not wear feather headdresses. I don't think our elementary school children would be the only ones surprised by these facts.

There is no other holiday with which I struggle as much as I do with Thanksgiving. As a day to give thanks, to recognize all that we have, it is a day I love to share with students. When it comes to the actual history of Thanksgiving, it is much tougher. Attempting to help young children understand the realities of the interactions between settlers and Native Americans is a monumental task. It is also a task I don't believe to be developmentally appropriate for early elementary school students.

There are many wonderful places to look for useful information for planning lessons throughout the elementary years. Plimoth Plantation has several good resources. An interactive You are the Historian takes students through myths and facts, daily life for Pilgrims and Native Americans, and the lead-up to 1621. There are also several interesting articles about Thanksgiving. However, Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia also claims to have celebrated the first official Thanksgiving.

For primary source resources, the Library of Congress has a collection that includes letters and proclamations about Thanksgiving, photographs of Thanksgiving celebrations, and paintings depicting artists' interpretations of the Plimoth Thanksgiving. For the history of Thanksgiving as a holiday the Smithsonian has a brief, well-written article.

As for my 1st graders, this year we'll be reading Eve Bunting's How Many Days to America? A Thanksgiving Story. This book tells the story of a young family hurriedly leaving a Caribbean nation, facing many challenges in an attempt to reach America. It's a beautiful tale of giving thanks. We'll share our reasons to be thankful and celebrate them.

Established in 1988, Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the history of Americans with family roots in Spanish-speaking countries. Unlike other heritage months, which begin at the beginning of a month and end at the end, Hispanic American Heritage Month begins on September 15 and ends on October 15. Why? Use this question to kick off your exploration of the month, and deepen it with resources from Teachinghistory.org and elsewhere!

Begin tracing back the rich strands of Hispanic American history with Teachinghistory.org's materials, including a roundup of resources across the Web, a lesson plan on civil rights and agricultural workers in the U.S., and reviews of websites preserving the experiences of Hispanic Americans. Take a quiz that "zooms in" on primary sources, or read what historians have to say about historical U.S.-Mexico relations in Ask a Historian.

Go further afield with materials from across the web. Check out these dedicated Hispanic Heritage Month pages:

• Smithsonian Education rounds up more than 20 educator resources and Smithsonian Magazine articles.
• The Library of Congress guides visitors to relevant exhibits, collections, images, and audiovisual materials.
• The U.S. Army chronicles the service of Hispanic Americans with an interactive timeline and biographical profiles.
• The White House archives Hispanic Heritage Month presidential proclamations.
• The National Park System catalogs details on more than 40 historical sites, monuments, and memorials related to Hispanic American history and features nine related Teaching with Historic Places lesson plans.
• EDSITEment pulls together five lesson plans, 10 featured websites, recommendations for bilingual resources, and a virtual field trip.
• Publisher Scholastic invites students to explore their own heritage, meet famous present-day and historical Latinos, and more with its interactive "Celebrate Hispanic Heritage" feature.
• The U.S. Census Bureau displays statistics related to Hispanic American heritage.
• Biography.com gives you a peek into the lives of Hispanic American artists, political figures, and more.

(So why does Hispanic Heritage Month start on September 15? The day marks the anniversary of the independence of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Once part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, these nations formed the United Provinces of Central America after becoming independent from both Mexico and Spain in 1821.)

Declared an official national holiday in 1894, the roots of Labor Day stretch back much further. Long before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of organized labor, colonists and Native peoples labored to provide for themselves and their families and to support their societies. U.S. citizens continue to work in many ways and at many jobs.

How has work changed over time? Take a look at our Labor Day spotlight page. We've gathered lesson plans, website reviews, teaching strategies, and more on American labor history. Using these resources, you and your students can ask questions about the nature of work and search for answers.

Need some questions to get started? For each particular time and place, ask:

• Was work divided by gender? What tasks were associated with each gender? How strictly were these divisions followed? How have they changed over time?
• Similarly, was work divided by age? What tasks were associated with different ages? How strictly were these divisions followed? How have they changed over time?
• What did people consider "work"? What did the word mean? Were work and play distinct?
• How were differing ideas of work addressed or resolved? Think about contact between Native peoples and colonists, or between groups of immigrants from different countries.
• Why do people work? How were they compensated (if at all)?
• How was work regulated? Did the people doing the work make the rules?
• What skills, education, or background knowledge were required for various jobs?
• Did people choose to do work? What might the consequences be if they did not work?

There are many more questions to ask! Brainstorm with your students. Ask them what they think of as work. Do they like it? Why do they do it? What kinds of work do the adults in their lives do? They may be surprised at how much the idea of work has changed over time—and even how much it varies from person to person today.

Have you finished preparing for the holiday next week? If you haven't (or even if you have), take a look at our spotlight page on Thanksgiving. From teaching ideas to online quizzes to primary and secondary sources, we've gathered all of our Thanksgiving material in one place.

If you need more materials on the holiday, its history, and the myths and facts about contact between Native peoples and Pilgrim colonists, other history resource sites have pulled together useful ideas and materials, too.

• Download primary sources and a teacher's guide from the Library of Congress's Thanksgiving primary source set, and read up on the holiday's past with the Library's November 25 "Today in History" entry.
• Read Thanksgiving proclamations from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, admire photos of presidentially pardoned turkeys, and learn about the year of two Thanksgivings, courtesy of NARA's Thanksgiving post.
• Browse a handful of Thanksgiving lesson plans from Verizon Thinkfinity, ReadWriteThink, and other sources at EDSITEment.
• The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History relates the work of women in creating the modern Thanksgiving, and offers a lesson plan for learning more about the day.
• For short videos on the first Thanksgiving, the history of the holiday, and other topics, try HISTORY.com's Thanksgiving page.
• Elementary-level teachers, guide your students through the history behind the holiday with Plimoth Plantation's interactive "Investigating the First Thanksgiving: You are the Historian."

Once called Armistice Day, Veterans Day has evolved into a day of recognition for all U.S. military veterans, not only those who fought in World War I. This year, the holiday falls on a Friday (November 11), only a week away. How do you celebrate Veterans Day? How do your students celebrate? Do they have veterans in their families? Do they know the history of the holiday? Each student's awareness of Veterans Day and his or her understanding of what it means and how it should be observed will be unique—and ripe for discussion and exploration.

This year, Teachinghistory.org has gathered all of our resources on Veterans Day in one place: our Veterans Day spotlight page. On the page, you can find materials for learning about the history of Veterans Day and the branches of the U.S. military and about the experiences of individual soldiers at war—from the American Revolution to the present day. Get ideas for teaching with monuments and memorials and with oral history, or watch a historian analyze civil war letters. Take quizzes on the 54th Massachusetts (the African American Civil War regiment featured in the film Glory), Operation Desert Storm, and other topics related to veterans and war. (Remember that our previous spotlight pages, on 9/11, Constitution Day, and Columbus Day are still available—and don't forget to visit our new Thanksgiving spotlight.)

If you need more resources, the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project preserves the experiences of thousands of veterans through oral history. The memories of more than 3,000 veterans are featured online, including interview transcripts and audio and video recordings (go to "Search the Veterans Collection" and choose "yes" for "Transcript?" and "Digitized Collection?"). A Library of Congress blog entry gives a quick overview of the Project and ways to use it in the classroom.

At HISTORY.com, you or your students can learn about the Take a Veteran to School program, tweet in honor of veterans (use hashtag #thankavet), or read guidelines for donating photos to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The 21-min. online video "The Story of Veterans Day" gives a quick, accessible introduction to the holiday and its history.

For recent materials on Veterans Day, check out the official White House website. Here, you can read Obama's Veterans Day proclamations and find photos and articles on the celebration of Veterans Day in recent years. The Department of Veterans Affairs lists regional Veterans Day observances—and also features a free downloadable teacher resource guide.

Every September 17, Constitution Day calls on teachers to memorialize—and critically engage with—Constitutional history in the classroom. But what approach to the Constitution should you take? What quality teaching resources are available? How can you interest your students in a document that is more than 200 years old?

In 2008, Teachinghistory.org published a roundup of Constitution Day resources. Many of those resources remain available, but online Constitution Day content continues to grow. Check out the sites below for materials that recount the Constitutional Convention of 1787, compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, explore U.S. Supreme Court cases that have interpreted the Constitution, and apply the Constitution to contemporary debates.

The Library of Congress's Constitution Day page collects the full text of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Amendments, as well as the Federalist Papers and the Articles of Confederation. Lesson plans for grades 6–12 accompany the documents. The page also includes short suggested reading lists for elementary, middle, and high school, and links to relevant Library of Congress American Memory collections, such as Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and the papers of James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Also check out the Library's collection of primary sources "Creating the United States."

You can find an elegant, simple presentation of the Constitution on the National Archives' Constitution Day page. Check out their high-resolution PDF of the original document, part of NARA's 100 Milestone Documents exhibit.

If the Constitution is proving a difficult read for your students, try the National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution. Search the text by keyword or topic, and click on passages that are unclear to find explanatory notes from Linda R. Monk's The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution. The Constitution Center also offers its own Constitution Day page, with a short video on the creation of the Constitution, interactive activities, and quizzes.

If you're not already familiar with EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities, take a look through their extensive collection of lesson plans. A quick search reveals more than 90 lessons related to the Constitution.

Interested in bringing home to students the Constitution's importance today? The New York Times' Constitution Day page links current events to the Constitution in more than 40 lesson plans. The Times also invites students to submit answers to questions such as "Should School Newspapers Be Subject to Prior Review?" and "What Cause Would You Rally Others to Support?"

Can't find anything here that sparks your interest or suits your classroom? Many more organizations and websites offer Constitution Day resources, including the Bill of Rights Institute, the American Historical Association, Annenberg Media, and Consource. (Check out our Lesson Plan Reviews for a review of a lesson plan from Consource on the Preamble to the Constitution.)