Teaching Thanksgiving - Attempt #2

The great cranberry debate of 2010 continues.

As I was giving my little Thanksgiving speech, quite well honed in French by now except I keep forgetting the word for "stuffing" (just went and looked it up again, it's la farce), I got to the part about the cranberry and paused, waiting for the response I've come to expect.  "C'est quoi un cranberry?"  "In French, it's canneberge," I say, writing both cranberry and canneberge on the board.  Blank stares.  "Ah, you mean a blueberry," the teacher said.  "No, it's a fruit from the United States," I replied, holding up a picture.  "That looks like cherries," said the entire class and the teacher almost in unison.  "No, it's not a cherry, it's a cranberry.  It's a special fruit we have in the United States that you don't have here."  Once we were in agreement that it wasn't a blueberry or a cherry, the teacher then showed tremendous presence of mind and looked it up in a children's dictionary, and read them the definition in French.  I wish I had thought of that, that was brilliant.  That would have saved me 10 minutes yesterday.

I'm still confused as to why everyone's first guess is blueberry.  The word for blueberry is myrtille, so it's not like my pronunciation of either cranberry or canneberge would be leading them to that conclusion.  "Cherry" I understand, because they do look a little bit like cherries.  But blueberry?

In my CM2 classes, I add an element to the hand turkey activity: they have to write "I'm thankful for _____" in English with one thing they're thankful for.  Today, most of them wrote things like "family" and "friends", but a couple students wrote "I'm thankful for Megan", and one of them stood up and read it out.  They have been duly added to my growing list of "favorites".  There were two kids from the CP class hanging out for some reason, and they made turkeys too (surprise, kids, you're doing that again on Monday in your class!).  One of them wrote SPIDER-MAN in huge letters across the top.  I'm not sure if that was supposed to be his name, his turkey's name, or the thing he was thankful for.  I had to convince the other student, a little girl, that it wasn't a chicken.  She smiled and nodded sweetly, but I think she was humoring me.  "Oh, silly foreign teacher, can't tell that it's a chicken."