Happy Thanksgiving!

I love the holiday season! We were so excited to do some fun Thanksgiving related activities. There are so many to pick from! We could make handprint turkeys, or paper bag clothes like we used to do in elementary school when we were kids. Or we could make a giant turkey and add feathers for things we’re thankful for. So many activities to pick from and only three days!

And two picky kids with really short attention spans. Hmm… quick and easy it is.

Story

It turns out that we don’t have a book about Thanksgiving. I’ll fix that for next year, for sure. It might be an overlooked holiday, but I think the story behind it is still important. It teaches us to help others and share.

So, instead of a book, we watched a video about it. It didn’t go as in-depth as I would have liked, but the ones that did were long and by now we all know that these two kids aren’t going to sit long enough to watch.

Flashcards

Even though we’re focusing on the holiday this week, it’s still important that we stay consistent and do the flashcards. Plus, since we’ve been working on some of the enunciation, it’s important that we don’t skip this step.

Songs

We love the Storybots! Their songs are super clever and fun, even if they are quite a bit more difficult to learn and remember. We watched their Thanksgiving video today and then also spent some time trying to learn the Five Little Turkeys song. Both kids actually participated and had a good time. It was fun!

Tracing Page

We used this turkey tracing page from Education.com today instead of a letter one. Lucy asked to color hers too but then saw that Nixon didn’t want to and changed her mind. They’re both trying harder to hold their pencils/crayons correctly and they’re focusing more when they actually trace things. It was fun to watch them do it.

Activities

We tried doing two activities today. With there being so many to do, I didn’t want to miss out on anything!

(Yeah… I also sometimes wonder if I’m doing this just as an excuse to do some easy crafts…)

I thought I’d found the perfect first activity today. Nixon and Lucy both LOVE M&M’s and when I came across this Skittles game I thought it would be fun to modify it a bit and let them use M&M’s instead.

I’d prepped stuff in advance. I counted 30 M&M’s per person and put them in snack sized Zip-loc bags. (30 is way too many. 15 would have been plenty. And I should have put them in a bowl instead of a bag.) I had to modify the page with the dots on it because M&M’s come in six colors and Skittles only come in five, plus the colors are a little bit different.

I set everything up and explained how it was supposed to work. Without looking, they would put their hands in their own bag (which I was holding for them) and pull out one M&M. They would put the M&M on the page on top of the color it matched. Then they would tell me what they were thankful for that matched the dot. I gave some examples and everything.

I let Lucy go first. She pulled out an M&M and instantly popped it in her mouth.

Oy. Little kids are fast.

I had her open her mouth so I could see what color the M&M was and then she told me something she was thankful for.

Then it was my turn. I showed them exactly what they should do. I pulled one out of the bag, put it on the matching dot on the paper, and then said what I was thankful for.

Then it was Nixon’s turn. Straight in his mouth. Jared and I were both trying to stop him, so he pulled it out, checked the color and then put the slobbery M&M on the matching dot on the paper (check out the blue dot in the pic – haha!). We asked him what he was thankful for. Stares. He finally said that he was thankful for his mom and then ate it.

Then it was Jared’s turn. He modeled it for them too.

Lucy’s turn. She stopped herself! She matched it to the dot and then told us what she was thankful for and ate the M&M. It started to work from there, but like I said, 30 is too many. We should’ve only had 15. At some point we just stopped because they were obviously done with it.

My favorite was when Lucy got one for Place and her answer was Costco. That girl does love a good trip to Costco.

We had another fun activity planned and they actually liked it. Lucy loves puppets and we made a brown paper bag into a turkey puppet. I’d precut the little pieces so all they had to do was glue them on. It was pretty funny watching them figure it out. Lucy started to glue one of the eyes on one of the feathers instead of on the bag, but we got it before the glue dried and “fixed” it.

They played with them for the rest of the day.

All Done!

There are some things I would do differently next time, but overall we had a lot of fun today. I think they enjoyed the activities, especially since one of them included candy.

I also found that they weren’t really getting what “thankful” meant. We started using other words to help them understand. Instead of “What’s another place you’re thankful for?” we would ask, “What’s another one of your favorite places?” Instead of “Who else are you thankful for?” we would ask, “Who is another person you really like/love?” Then we would talk about why they were thankful for that person or why they liked them. They seemed to start to get it after a while, but by then they were running out of favorite places and people they knew.

Happy Thanksgiving – Day 1