Thanksgiving feast, crafts, experiments and a Freebie

Our Thanksgiving break is coming to an end and it’s time to get back to work. Hopefully everyone had a wonderful time with their friends and family. I know I did!! I love being off but I also love my little amigos and can’t wait to hear about everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) they did over the break. Kindergarteners are so awesome and LOVE sharing every minute of their lives.

Now, I’m going to share a few things we did prior to the break and haven’t had time to blog about.

During the month of November we spend a lot time discussing Pilgrims, Native Americans and the Mayflower. We discuss how the Native Americans helped the Pilgrims who then had a bountiful harvest and they had a meal to celebrate it and we added all new learning to our schema chart. Then we have a Thanksgiving feast with all of kindergarten. There are 10 kinder classes at our school so usually 5 classes are Native Americans and 5 classes are Pilgrims. The kids get to make costumes and dress up for the feast, make a Thanksgiving handprint placemat with a pattern border and have a Thanksgiving meal. Many of our students are bilingual students and have never celebrated Thanksgiving before. The feast always turns out so cool. I love it and so do the kids!!

 

I love reading Turkey Trouble and then having the kids think of other foods we can eat instead of turkey for Thanksgiving. These projects always turn out so cute. 

We also make a list of what we are thankful for after reading Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks. Then we make this turkey craft and write what we are thankful for on the feathers.

Also, before the holiday we were discussing sources of energy and changes caused by heat. We did several activities trying to melt chocolate, marshmallows and butter but the activity they loved the best was popping popcorn in an air pop machine. I love their faces in the pictures. We had so much fun, but we should’ve kept some of that melted butter for our popcorn!

For Veteran’s Day we made the veteran craft from Deanna Jump’s Veteran Unit. I made it half the normal size and they came out super miniature but kind of cute. Then the students wrote thank you notes to the veterans.

We also did a few activities from our Pumpkins, Pumpkins Everywhere unit. We measured our pumpkin with cubes, estimated how big it is with yarn, tested to see if it would float, carved it, took out the seeds and roasted them. 

Lastly here’s a freebie that’s on our TpT site. It’s a clip it game in Spanish called Clip It! Initial Sound Cards. Hope you can use it!! 

Thanks for reading!!

Sandra & Cindy