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. 

Week 8: Pumpkins Galore!

Alphabet Activities
We're continuing our work with word families, to drive home sounding out letters and using vowels appropriately in CVC words. I made up this little pumpkin patch activity for our pumpkin theme.

The word family work is serving its purpose. I was looking through some old books today and found "Hop on Pop." I flipped through it with Lucy and had her read the parts I knew she could sound out. She did great! It was also cool for her to read the sight words she's been learning in actual sentences in an actual book. She was so proud of herself! As was I!

Math
Lucy is a stellar counter, but until this week couldn't make it farther than 49. I realized it's because she doesn't know the numbers 50, 60, etc. So this week we learned to count by tens and identify those bigger numbers. I printed out the "10s" chart from this free printable pack:

Courtesy of blessbeyondadoubt.com

First, I had her dab the numbers 10, 20, 30, etc. with a Bingo dabber. I counted in a sing-song voice as she dabbed. Since she already knows 10-40, I explained that 50 is the last tricky one she's just going to have to memorize, but then the rest are easy. You just look at the first number and add a "dee" to it. Six-dee, seven-dee, and so on. She caught on in no time. Then, I labeled 10 pumpkins 10-100 and had her arrange them in numerical order.

We also did this worksheet, to practice counting by 10s, and show how you can use counting by tens to add.

I pretended the candy is all a part of the pumpkin/Halloween theme. ;-) Worksheet from education.com.

Today, for the first time, she sat down with her 10s chart and pointed to every number, counting aloud to 100. Mission accomplished!

Sight Words
On Monday, we did this sight word game that I forgot to do during our spider theme last week.

I got the free printable from education.com, and wrote sight words randomly throughout the web. We used a regular die (instead of the one you can print from the website) and identified sight words as we landed on them.

And today we did Bingo again. I'm running out of creative sight word ideas . . .

Literature
We read the following pumpkin-themed books:

The Pumpkin Mystery - this one was long, but had a fun surprise about how new pumpkins grow from old pumpkin seeds.

Pumpkin Cat - this had nothing to do with pumpkins, but was a cute story about a cat living in a library. I love any book about libraries. 

Pumpkin Jack - the pumpkin book favored by preschools across the nation. A fun look at a pumpkin's life cycle. Lucy loved that the pumpkin had a name. 

While I was reading the books, Lucy sorted through my bag of tissue paper squares to find all the orange ones. She does so much better with listening to books when she has something to do with her hands.

Then we made a totally un-original tissue paper pumpkin on a paper plate. (Whew! Points for alliteration!) I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but it looks a lot like this:

Source

Pumpkin Fun!
It wouldn't be a pumpkin unit without some pumpkin carving and seed roasting.

I used this genius tip from Pinterest that is probably common sense to most people: put trash bags on the table before you start so you can just scoop up all the goop and mess in one fell swoop.

I used this recipe.

We also made these fun jack-o-lantern quesadillas:

And today, while I was prepping our activities, the girls had a blast simply drawing on the pumpkins with pens. Who knew that'd be so entertaining?

We're taking next week off from school. (We'll just call it fall break. ;-) ) But I'll be back in two weeks with more wit, wisdom, and delightful pinspiration for all your homeschool needs! ;-)