Thanksgiving Already!?I

I cannot believe that it is already time for thanksgiving! Where has the year gone? Trust me, I'm not complaining. The faster the year flies by, the better. I do love Thanksgiving time though. Stuffing my face full of turkey and cranberries is what makes this holiday so great! I am sad to see that it is overlooked because of Christmas. Thanksgiving is still a week away, and I'm already hearing Christmas music in the stores. My neighbors even have their Christmas lights up!!

Needless to say, Thanksgiving is here and it's time to talk about the Pilgrim's and Indians. I have to say, my kiddos thoroughly enjoyed this unit we did. I can't blame them. We did a lot of fun things!! :) 

Math:

Turkey Bingo:

My students LOVE bingo. I try to incorporate it into several of my themes and they are VERY easy to make. For this bingo, I have pictures with turkeys and numbers on them. For the markers, I had them use popcorn :) Our room smelled very yummy! To make it easier, I have them fill up the whole sheet to win Bingo.

Patterns:
 During small groups I had my students work on shape patterns. I had them glue the shapes on sentence strips after they made the patterns. Depending on group difficulty, they made AB, ABBA and ABC.

  

We also made patterns with Indians and Pilgrams.

Graphing:

I had my students graph what they would rather eat on Thanksgiving day, turkey or ham. You can tell which one they liked better!

 Estimation:

We estimated how many students could fit in our pretend Mayflower :) We were able to fit 15!

  

Language and Literacy:

Turkey Chant:

My students ended up memorizing this chant and have actually been making up other places where the turkeys are. Each student got a turn using a pointer to follow along with the words.

Turkey's Week:

I read the book Cookies Week to the students and then we made our on book called Turkey's Week. The kiddos had fun coming up with "bad" things that the Turkey would do. I wrote the book in front of them, and illustrated it on my own. (Unfortunately, I don't have pictures now but will upload them soon)

Phonological Awareness:

Turkey Rhyme:

We have been working on rhyming words A LOT in my classroom. For this activity, we used a different color everyday. (ex. words that rhyme with cat, we colored red. Words that rhymed with pat, we colored green etc...) At the end of they week, the turkey was nice and colorful!

Art:

This is alot like the spider web that we made during spider week. I had the students draw an Indian symbol using glue and they sprinkled color sand on it. Make sure you use a box so that sand doesn't go everywhere! To have the different colors, the students only drew a little bit of the Indian symbol at a time. I had them make a border around their plate using crayons before using the glue and sand.

Indian Drums:
I cut out strips of orange paper and had the students draw Indian symbols on it. (I did this as an independent small group activity) Then we used coffee cans and glued the paper around it. We played these during music and movement and created patterns with beats. We also had an Indian rain dance and played our drums. The kiddos loved that!

 Indian Hats:

I had to paper bags filled with different words. Bag 1 had different types of animals and bag 2 had adjectives. The students had to draw a word from each bag to create their Indian name (Examples: White Tiger and Swift Fish) I wrote the names on a sentence strip and had the students draw Indian Symbols on their hats and added feathers! They wore them during the Indian Rain Dance too.

 Extras:

We made our very own butter! All you need is heavy whipping cream, a marble, a jar (We used a peanut butter jar) and shake for about 20 minutes!

Our very on Teepee!! We got 4 1X2 at Home Depot and tied them up at the top with rope. Next, we draped some old white sheets over them, paint some Indian Symbols and VOILA, you have a teepee!!

Thanksgiving Countdown:

Super easy to make and the students enjoyed counting down till Thanksgiving!

Yummy Snacks!
After learning about Squanto and how he helped the Pilgrams grow corn, we made our own tasty treat!
All you need is: Oreos, goldfish crackers and candy corn.
Put the Oreos in a plastic bag and have the students crush them and then pour them in a cup. Add the candy corn and sprinkle some goldfish on top and you have yourself a tasty treat!

On of my students parents made these and I thought I would share it with you. They are turkey's made out of pretzels, candycorn, Hershey kisses and an M&Ms! They were very delicious!

Well that's it! Hope you enjoyed my Thanksgiving Unit and got a couple of ideas for your classroom!