Giving Thanks

Okay, so I'm WAY behind & I'm playing catch up. Between the holidays beginning, illness, birthday parties, lesson plans and life in general; I've fallen behind in my blogging. So if you haven't already been able to tell I'm trying to get the last month in so I can post about our fun activities for December. So like I said in the Sick day post, our Thanksgiving unit got cut short but we did manage to squeeze in a few fun activities.

Here is our Thanksgiving 'tree'. I originally wanted to do a large one the wall with paper cutouts, but then decided it was too much work and we really didn't have the wall space. So I started to look around at what we had & came up with this. I didn't spend a dime on it, it was all stuff I had plus it was nice and small. The limbs are from our backyard, the dry black beans from our pantry and the twine and construction paper from the school shelves. Yea for re-purposing! It took B a few days to understand what this tree was really about, we got the whatever he was looking at or thinking about at that moment responses for a few but then the more meaningful ones came. We will definitely be recreating this one next year.

Since our unit was shortened due to illnesses, I had to re-think our plans. So each day we learned something new about Thanksgiving.

Day One...

The Mayflower: Large ship that carried the Pilgrims to America.

 The sail was larger but B decided he didn't want to cut along the lines. ;)

Day Two...

The Pilgrims - we read a few stories on them, looked at pictures and made a hat.

Day Three...

The Indians (Native Americans) - we reread books and looked at other pictures and made the feathered hat.

We even got to put together these fun shape Indians from 2Teaching Mommies.

Day Four...

Thanksgiving - Re read again and talked about the feast and how the Indians help the Pilgrims

 by showing them how to grow crops.

 We made some Indian corn too.

We also talked about the differences between the Pilgrims and Indians.

*also from 2TeachingMommies.

A fun Thanksgiving turkey snack.

Day Five...

Thanksgiving day...We made this shirt at the beginning of the week, B liked making something he got to wear. He got so many comments that day too about his 'turkey' shirt. He liked telling them it said 'happy' and 'day'. Yes, there is a bruise under his eye. The night before, he leaned on the edge of a toy box and it popped back up and hit him. Luckily no black eye.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!