Thankful Wreaths and Turkey Lurkey Cupcakes~ A Thanksgiving 2017 Recap

The links on this blog and in the posts may be affiliate links. 
Please see my disclosure policy for full details and thank you for your support!

Hello all! I hope you had a simply marvelous Thanksgiving! We had a low key one this week with my parents and brother. We are having the BIG one with my husband's family, when they all arrive next week. It's going to be a madhouse! LOL. I promised that I would share a few things that we did to make our Thanksgiving week fun.

On Monday, we began reading about Thanksgiving and how it came about. We read a few Thanksgiving books to give background about the topic--I did this mostly for my youngest. My oldest is very knowledgeable about it after

Our Favorite THANKSGIVING Books and Activities

The links on this blog and in the posts may be affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for full details and thank you for your support!
It's that time of year! When if you are a homeschooler or maybe have preschoolers and/or toddlers at home, you might be considering planning out things to do next week for Thanksgiving! Maybe you have eyeballed some crafts on Pinterest. Or are trying to collect some great books to read. In order to help fuel your ideas, here are some things that I try to work in to our Thanksgiving week studies each year!

Thanksgiving Books

Okay, let's not beat around the bush. Finding books is probably like the EASIEST thing to do. Nearly every library already has them up on display for you--but there are SOOOOOOOOOOO many! How do you know what ones to get? Well I always go with our "tradition" ones, and then like to add in a few new ones each year. Some of them are factual but most of them are just fun! Here is a short list of my favorites, as well as the ones that I grabbed for our reading basket this year--they are mix of older and younger reader books!

Thanksgiving Blessings

Be safe my friends. There are a lot of crazies on the road out there. Enjoy this Thanksgiving! I know that we will be enjoying our first one with my parents moved out here. It's been a couple years since we had a Thanksgiving all together. I know that we have so much to be grateful for--especially considering what happened a couple weeks ago. Life is precious and I am blessed to be able to enjoy it surround by family and friends--may the same be for you!

Homeschool Photo Journal of Second Grade and PreK

I owe all my readers a LOT of posts about how our homeschooling has been going this year. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to catch it all up with words. I did decide that I could give you a photo journal about what we've been doing...everyone loves pictures, right?!

So bear with me...this is going to be photo heavy!

I did try to separate it by subject to help you get a balance of what we've done throughout the year!

English

Cursive work (Little Britches)

Little Britches will be finishing up the Pentime Transition 2 book this week and moving into his Pentime Cursive Level 3 book. His cursive is very well done and he has enjoyed learning how to write the letters.

Matching Letters for Words

 I had all these letters from an old curriculum a friend gave me. I laminated them and we use them to help Baby Britches build words. I copy down words and names that he knows and then he hunts for the letters to match. He sometimes needs a little help, but doesn't most of it on his own.

English (Little Britches)

 This is part of our First Language Lessons of a Well-Trained Mind Level 2 curriculum. He was building sentences using linking verbs with his nouns and adjectives.

ABC's (Baby Britches)

We've been working through the ABC's with Baby Britches. We aren't as consistent as I'd like to be with him, but I just maximize the learning time when he gives me his attention. I like to use worksheets from education.com for the alphabet.

ABC's Baby Britches

 He's finding all the G's that are in the words on his page...

ABC's (Baby Britches)

Here is the "B is for Bus" from the Royal Baloo Zoomin' Moving ABC's set. We love this set and it's our primary choice for worksheets for Baby Britches. Here he is stamping letters onto the bus.

History

History (Little Britches)

 Filling out his notebook page on Columbus for his history binder from My Father's World Second Grade.

Building wigwams

The boys enjoyed the study on Native Americans--especially building a wigwam. LOTS of glue. Make sure you use LOTS of glue. LOL!

Science

Floating Boats

As part of our exploration of the pilgrims, the boys had to attempt to float some foil boats with straw masts.

Seeing how the water and air work together to keep a piece of paper from getting wet and all the water inside a cup.

Exploring water and salt. Will salt water float an egg?

By changing the shape of a piece of paper we can change how quickly it moves in the wind...and what better way to test that theory by having a race??

Hot air rises...and so it can make a paper snake wiggle if you get it in an updraft. He's as close as I'd let him get on his own...and thanks to the ceiling fan overhead, "my 'nake wiggle, Mommy!"

Art

He is playing with all the colors on his palate

Thanksgiving

Decorating his Native American (bag) vest with stencils

Decorating his vest with his markers

 Adding leaf foam stickers to his woven placemat

 Weaving a placemat

A Foam Kit Turkey (found at the $1 store!)

Exploration

Loves working with the corn and noodle box

Working with the Guidecraft 3D Feel and Find World Icons and Shapes. He loves matching these up and it's great for recognition skills.

I hope you enjoyed this little photo journal of things we have been working on! I plan on doing another one very soon as I just scratched the surface of our studies!

Let's Talk Turkey and Wampum!

With the arrival of November comes the beginning of our Thanksgiving unit--which is going to go from now until Thanksgiving. I have been snagging great ideas for arts/crafts, math, social studies, language arts, etc from all my wonderful blogging friends as well as some E-books I downloaded from the Scholastic Teacher Express site. Yesterday was the first day of our studies and we started off my making Turkey Magnets. Talk about a little boy in heaven! He ADORES paint and really got into this activity. These are turkeys of which you have NEVER seen the like! LOL! We made several since Little Britches wanted to make sure one graced the refrigerator of all his main relatives!

Baby Britches has been going crazy seeing them on the fridge and signs "please" and points at them! LOL!

We cut each one out and now I'm making a little card to go with them before we bag them up and mail them out!

Today I introduces the history of Thanksgiving to Little Britches. I found a really good simple story in my What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know book. There are no dates. Just a basic summary of why they left England. Then a bit about their voyage--including a sample (pretend) diary entry for a small child on the voyage. Little Britches enjoyed that because it was written from a kids point of view--making it easier for him to understand. After we read the chapter, we talked about it and discussed the Indians who helped the Pilgrims and what it was like for them. I referenced the way the Indians helped them to our scripture of the week "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39).

Next we looked at images online of the Mayflower including a cross-section of the ship to get an idea about what it would be like to have to stay below deck for so long. Little Britches favorite part? The Poop Deck of course! LOL! We pulled down our world map to see how big the ocean is from England (which he remembered from our FIAR of How to make an Apple Pie and see the World)to the "New World" and then compared that to the distance from our house (in Kentucky) to "Mum-Mum's House" (in Washougal, WA). We decided the ocean distance was at least TWICE as big!

We spoke about the Indians a bit more than I explained that the indians used beads as a way to buy things--instead of money. We talked about Wampum and experimented with dyeing our own purple "wampum". My color of purple was gorgeous, but I guess it doesn't work well on whole wheat pasta! LOL! I didn't even think about that! LOL! I will go buy some regular tomorrow to try again. In the meantime we used white and purple plastic pony beads. He strung them on a piece of yarn--purple on one side, white on the other. 

Then throughout the day he had to pay me "wampum" for different things. Using the phone to call Papaw. Getting a drink of water. Getting an apple. We'll continue doing this for awhile so he gets the idea--or until he gets tired of it.

We had an excellent day of class and I'm excited that he's enjoying learning about the history of Thanksgiving...I think his favorite thing to do today was to paint...me! 

I too made a turkey; however, my turkey did not look as cool as his, so it didn't get photographed! LOL!

If you need any more details or want a supplies list of what we used, please let me know! This is a great activity and one that could easily be adapted for even a classroom!