Week 6: Thanksgiving and Turkeys!

We have spent the last week-and-a-half learning about Thanksgiving and specifically turkeys!

Our week began with our first field trip with our co-op to a turkey farm in Eden, NY.  Here is Haier's Turkey Farm Facebook profile.  What a great experience for the kids!  Mr. Haier was amazing and incredibly welcoming to our little group of 5 kids and 3 babies.

So neat! If you say, "Gobble, gobble, gobble" to a turkey it will talk back to you! The kids and adults got a kick out of this. Turkey calling...

Here are some turkeys in the loft.

 Muffins the cow.

It was a fabulous cold day with flurries!

After a tour of the barn we went into the garage where all the, ahem, turkey prep is done.  I found that part very interesting and tried not to get too caught up in it.  All the birds were going to be prepped for sale a few days after we left. Haier's Turkey Farm is probably much quieter right now! I'm pretty sure there were around 1800-2000 Turkey's at the farm.  They will all be on someones Thanksgiving Day table this year.

The kids got a snack from Mr. Haier. 

Turkey week was full of crafts, the first one being a turkey made from a paper bowl, construction paper, finger paint and glue.  Anything messy is always fun!  My cousin helped out taking pictures and supervising this activity while babysitting one day. 

Our printables this week were from 1+1+1=1.  Here, my daughter is tracing the path from the pilgrim to the turkey. She is getting really good at tracing and I have seen a huge improvement since we started school.

More cutting practice.

The letter of the week was T of course! I had the letter T on the window all week with the letters underlined. The kids also worked on a T worksheet where once again we saw a big improvement in writing.  Plus we are learning to color in the lines. Bonus!

Here is a serving tray filled with only letter T items.

Placing Cheerios on the letter T.

One evening before bed I taught the kids about small, medium and large.  This took a bit to get the hang of, but they did understand the size concept after a few minutes.

Here they are painting their "Thankful Wreaths". Just a paper plate, with the middle cut out then painted green with different color leaves pasted around the edges. Earlier in the week I explained what it mean to be thankful and they began listing all the family members they are thankful for. I also got a few cute responses such as "I am thankful for eggs, suckers," that type of thing! I wrote what they were thankful for on the leaves of the wreath. 

All finished!

Of course we had to create the classic children's Thanksgiving turkey from handprints! 

The 15 month loved this project too! 

We read My First Thanksgiving by Tomi Depaola

 Turkey-making kit from Target

Mommy's little Pilgrims!  I found this kit at Wegmans and meant to use it for our co-op Thanksgiving feast.  We were supposed to host a wonderful little lunch for the kids in our co-op.  Low and behold with the Turkey in the oven and potatoes peeled I find something funky in one child's throat! UGH had to cancel the feast and we were all bummed.  Gotta love this time of year and the constant sicknesses going through the household.  At least I had dinner all made at 10:00am that day.

We hope everyone has a blessed Thanksgiving! We are onto some more BFIAR next week and Christmas activities.