Week 11: Turkeys

In the final week of our Thanksgiving unit, we had some fun with turkeys. (See also our units on Pilgrims and Indians.)

There's a cornucopia of turkey ideas on Pinterest, so I just picked a few of my favorites.

We did turkey word families:

On the orange one, we sounded out the word "ten" and when I told Lucy to write it, she wrote the number 10. Haha.

We wrote down things we're thankful for using our five senses:

It strangely took on a Christmas theme.

And we played the turkey gobble sight word game. I originally saw this game on Pinterest as a way to reinforce letter sounds, but since we've moved beyond that, I decided to use it for sight words instead. I wrote all our sight words on small pieces of paper and added 5 hand-drawn pictures of turkeys, then threw all the papers in a bag. I had Lucy draw a piece of paper one at a time. If it was a word, she had to read it to me. If it was a turkey, she had to run around the room "gobbling." It was such a hit! Even Lena got in on the action.

Our final activity was another lesson on skip counting by fives. I saw so many cute pictures on Pinterest of classrooms tracing their hands to make a "counting by fives" wall out of their hand turkeys.

Source

We obviously don't have a classroom's worth of hands to trace, but since we were hosting Thanksgiving dinner that week, I decided to have each member of our family trace their left hand and get it to me before Thanksgiving. While I was at Bible study on Tuesday, Justin and Lucy decorated all the hands. On Wednesday, I painstakingly cut them all out and arranged them as above to have Lucy count the fingers by fives. She didn't quite grasp it, but we still had another use for all those handprint turkeys:

Place cards! Aren't they adorable? We glued each hand to stiff cardstock, cut them out, then added clothespin legs.

Of course, we spent the whole month of November talking about what we're thankful for and recording it on our thankful tree:

Lucy thought of some pretty bizarre things to be thankful for (icicles??), but it's true that we're very blessed and thankful for all God has given us! Happy Thanksgiving!

Week 10: Indians

 We took the first week of November off, so I knew I had 3 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. I decided to divide them into 3 units: Pilgrims, Indians, and Turkeys. I've already written a post about our Pilgrim lesson, so check that out here.

In week 2, we studied Indians. I actually bought the book Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving on Amazon because I procrastinated and didn't have time to order it from the library. But I thought it was important that Lucy understand some of the Indians' way of life. It was a really interesting book. I actually learned a lot from it.

Afterward, we made a compare/contrast chart to show some of the differences and similarities between the Pilgrims and the Indians. Some of Lucy's answers were hilarious.

We made a super-pathetic teepee out of construction paper. I didn't even take a picture because it looked so bad.

And we pretended to be Indians hunting for Thanksgiving dinner with this super-fun word family scavenger hunt:

I was on top of my game this week and we did a bunch of free printable worksheets:

Thanksgiving-themed subtraction and CVC code word making. And Lucy has a problem with making "N's" into "M's." Those last two words aren't rum and bum. Lol.

The above worksheets are from this free download. (Subtraction is from thanksgivingpart5 pg. 8. CVC code is from  thanksgivingpart3 pg. 41-43.)

We also did some blends/word family work from the same download. (thanksgivingpart6 pg. 7-9)

And we started skip counting by 5s and used a cute Indian-themed printable puzzle from this download.