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!