Thanksgiving is this week and I'm so excited! We finished up our Turkeys Unit with some turkey coloring by number- something we all did great with- and by making a few more turkey art projects.
We made a "Texture Turkey" with various seeds, beans, pasta & feathers covering it and talked about what they all felt like. It was a great opportunity to use new vocabulary words like soft & bumpy, pokey & rough. Plus, it's a keepsake because we traced our hands to be the turkey's body outline. :)
In the vein of tracing our hands, we painted our fingers and palms of BOTH hands and stamped a turkey on two papers- one we made into a cute Thanksgiving card that was from "Your Little Turkey"- that's me! The second paper we painted BOTH our hands and stamped two turkey friends. The best part was gluing on the googly eyes, orange triangle beak and red wattle. Ms. Marianne had to look up what that red, bumpy thing hanging down from a turkey's face was. Who knew??
Since our letter of the week was Tt (and to review the rest of the letters we've learned because it was a short week), we practiced writing our Tt's (and other letters too!)
We followed patterns to create pictures with various shapes- great practice for our matching skills and observation. Ms. Marianne's favorite was the ice cream cone we created!
Our final art project of the week was a Thanksgiving pinecone turkey. Ms. Marianne used hot glue where we told her to and we pushed the turkey's feathers into the pinecone to create his tail. Then we glued on the googly eyes, the beak and wattle to the head and the head onto the pinecone. Lots of fine motor practice and artistic talents came through in this project!
Since this week was Thanksgiving, we had only two days of class. We had a special snack that went along with our family Thanksgiving traditions study- Ms. Marianne brought in pumpkin pie for us to enjoy while she discussed how her Mom and she make it together every year for the holidays. Other friends shared their special traditions too- like "the boys go shooting while the girls stay home and cook", "we go see our family that day" and "we eat a lot of food at the Thanksgiving feast and watch football!" :) The holidays are so great!
Finally, on Wednesday, we read The Very First Thanksgiving Day by Rhonda Gowler Greene. This is a neat book that introduces (with well researched & accurate text and pictures) all of the participants of the very first Thanksgiving Feast and discusses why the feast was had. It's a cyclical story that repeats itself & builds step by step until it's back to the Thanksgiving Feast. Definitely a great way to introduce Pilgrims, Indians, the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock to preschoolers. The discussions we had were great! :)
This was a fun and full of memorable activities for us all.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of us and our families!
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne
