Thanksgiving

Dramatic Play
We had the housekeeping/kitchen set up back. I added some turkey plates and cups to make it more Thanksgiving-ish. They loved cooking Thanksgiving feasts for each other!

Blocks
We played with mega blocks. I also brought out some trucks and tractors. I'm loving having this extra shelf for either dramatic play, or the block center, to add a few extra things the kids can pull out. There were also puzzles of things we learned about in past themes.

Art
We made turkeys, kinda :) I actually just had out glue and feathers and eyes, plus markers if they needed to draw anything. A few decided to make turkeys, but many made monsters, people, or just glued things together. It's why I love open-ended art! They can do and make whatever they want!


Day 2, we painted with feathers, and pipe cleaner turkey feet. It was funny watching them stomp the feet and act like turkeys as they painted.

Day 3, after our field trip, we did a turkey craft one of our moms supplied. The kids got to glue the turkey head and fathers to a body made of a brown paper sack. It was lots of fun, and really glue-y!

Small Manipulatives
The first day, we had our chameleons from last week out. They had been left to dry over the weekend, then I added the top spinning plate. They enjoyed playing with their plates and the stuffed chameleon.
 
We had out our favorite fall manipulatives, the squirrel pattern cards and apple counting cards.For Thanksgiving, we added turkey feather counting cards. They also liked playing with the feathers by sorting them by color.


I also added Leap Frog ABC magnets to the magnet board.
 
Outside
We played with wheat in the sensory table outside, along with all the other fun things to play out there! They really liked the wheat for digging and pouring. It's just so relaxing.

Large Group
We learned the word gratitude, and each day read a new Thanksgiving book. They taught about the pilgrims and Indians, and also about things we can be grateful for today. After reading each day, I also had them add thankful leaves to our tree, making it a thankful tree. Many ideas were pretty general, like family and friends, and some got pretty specific, like green popsicles. We also kinda learned the song, Over the River and Through the Woods.

On day 1, we reviewed our colors with Skittles turkey sorting mats. They got to sort their pile of Skittles by color, then they could eat them, or put them in a bag to bring home.

Day 2, we wrote in our journal about things we are thankful for. We also made our name turkeys, where the kids had to put the feathers with letters of their name in order. Their names were written on their turkey body to help. I didn't take pics, but you should have seen their turkey come home!

Day 3, was our field trip to Dick's! Thanks to all of you who came. Our host, Randy, was great with the kids and let them run and jump and be loud, so they all had a lot of fun. We toured the back of the store and saw where all the groceries are stored. We even got to go inside the fridges and freezers, and moo at customers from behind the milk.
We got to check out the loading dock, and ride up and down. They even got to go inside a frito lay truck, which they thought was amazing. Then they got to feed cardboard to the cardboard recycle monster. My son has been talking about that part ever since.
As we walked past the meat counter, we were also stopped by a customer who thought the kids were just so cute, she had to give each of them a dollar, including all the younger baby siblings. The kids loved that part!!
The bakery was pretty amazing too. We got to see glazed donuts, freshly dipped, and the giant ovens, plus watch the cake decorators at work.
The kids' favorite part was eating chocolate chip cookies at the end.
Once back at school, we added our favorite foods we are thankful for to our thankful tree, and they all said cookies!

Small Group
My group practiced rhyming words. I have a fall harvest game, with matching rhyming words. Rhyming is a difficult skill at this age, but I think worth introducing. They all did great at recognizing which words rhymed as I said them out loud, but did struggle with finding rhyming matches in the pictures by themselves. We worked as a group to match the rhyming cards. This is a skill we'll be working on all year.

Miss Kim's group played a harvest counting game. They all had harvest mats with pictures of grouped vegetables, and had to match the numeral cards to the correct amount of vegetables. They are doing wonderfully with their numbers and counting!

Both of these games were found at Kelly's Kindergarten.

Back to blogging!

Sorry parents! I've been a little busy and distracted and have not been great at keeping you updated on our blog. I added a few new posts below, so scroll down and check them out.


This month is already flying by! After baby's arrival, we took a week off of school, then thanks to my wonderful husband, and a wonderful grandma, we were right back to school! We even added 2 new friends to our class! The kids have been amazing and done really well with our substitute teachers! I am so pleased with how well they've done at just sticking to their routine of school, and even how well they've adapted to the changes. I have felt so great after having this baby, I've actually joined the class each day to lead large group and it's been so much fun to get right back into teaching.

The first week back, we still had a foot of snow, so we changed the routine a little bit to have outside time last. This way, we weren't doing the snow gear thing all day! Even with 3 of us, it took about 10-15 minutes to get them all ready and outside! Because of this, we may only have outside time once a week when I'm back to teaching on my own. The kids loved playing outside in the snow, especially painting the snow with the colored water in squirt bottles! They had a lot of fun learning about farm animals. We played animal sound bingo, had stick horse races, and both Troy and Kerrie got down on their hands and knees and took the kids for horseback rides! We had to cancel our field trip because of the weather, but we'll just reschedule for the spring! We also played with farm puzzles and counting games. It was a great week!

 This week, the weather was great again, so we were back on a regular schedule. We had a super fun day, wrapping up our unit on farm animals, and also learning a little about Thanksgiving. We shook a bottle of whipping cream to make our own butter to put on crackers for snack. And thanks to our substitute "grandma," as all the kids call her, we also got to make ice cream that we enjoyed after playing outside. We sure are grateful for the cows who give us milk! We learned a little about Thanksgiving, made turkeys, and sorted Skittles by color on these turkey sorting mats. Well, to be honest, we ate a lot of Skittles. We'll continue to work on the sorting thing!
 
Our awesome substitutes will help out 1 more week after Thanksgiving, then back to me full time! Thanks for all your help and willingness to be flexible this month! Your kids are the best!