How to talk to kids about Thanksgiving so that they really get it

(CNN)While cleaning out her first grade son's backpack last week, Elyse Gilbert found something that surprised her. Mixed in with the regular detritus of the school day, the crumpled sweatshirts and food wrappers, was a blatantly inappropriate Thanksgiving-themed worksheet.

On the top of the page: a smiling cartoon Native American with his arm around a giant piece of corn. Below, a word scramble featuring Thanksgiving-themed vocabulary words. Her son had successfully reassembled "inIdan" to "Indian."
"I literally gasped. I had assumed they had an updated curriculum about Thanksgiving," she said, explaining that she thought educators had moved beyond the fairy tale version of the holiday she learned three decades ago. You know, the one about togetherness and bounty that conveniently leaves out the part of the story in which Native Americans were systematically murdered and oppressed and replaces it with a second helping of pie.