If you are looking for new harvest/ thanksgiving poems and songs for your children to perform at your Harvest festival or Thanksgiving celebration these will be perfect as they are written especially for that purpose.
The idea is that they are either easily remembered or narrated, as there is always so little rehearsal time and never enough harvest performance poems and songs to go around, so these can be used individually with a class, or maybe even by mixing year groups to perform together. I won’t pressume to tell you how to use them or what age group to use them with, but I have provided a summary of the age and or ideas that I had in mind as I wrote them, but feel free to adapt them to suit your own purposes. I have no doubt that you will do it better than I could I have imagined!
This is a performance poem for older primary children. The individual letters of the word HARVEST are held up by seven children. At the beginning of each verse the children rearrange themselves so that they are in a suitable order for the bold words that follow. The appropriate letters are held aloft for each word, but lowered for the refrain.
A Thanksgiving Song
This easily remembered Harvest/ Thanksgiving song is sung to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know it”. It has 6 verses, going through the range of foods that we can give thanks for, and ending with thanks for family and friends.
I know that many schools have the children perform harvest / thanksgiving poems and songs at their harvest celebration, so this one is a little bit of both. The nursery rhymes provide the narration for the main poem, and I have simply amended them to be appropriate to harvest-time.