The consensus I have gathered through a facebook group for Ontario ELK educators is---the children will be interested in this if it is introduced to them-and some of them will talk about it no matter what.
With that all being said-we decided to go for the gusto! We started the Thanksgiving talk by reading a Thanksgiving book in our morning circle.
The book we read was called "The Great Turkey Race" written by Steve Metzger. It seemed a bit wordy at first and I thought "no way in the world are our wigglers going to sit for more then 2 pages of this book". Boy, did I prove myself wrong.
I tried to give each turkey a different voice, and I asked them to predict what was going to happen. They all got into it. Giggling, answering my questions, and making predictions. SUCCESS!
The next day I read the next book by Steve Metzger "The Amazing Turkey Rescue". Exact same response. It got kids talking all about Thanksgiving.
The teacher I work alongside-had the idea to have a community circle where we discussed what we were thankful for. :) I am finding the community circles so wonderful for providing them with vocabulary. They got to practice using the phrase "I am thankful for...."
On Thursday we were fortunate enough to have some scheduled time with our Reading Buddies. We took advantage of this. Their reading buddies helped them create a turkey.
I love this picture because you can see them working as a team with their reading buddy-and I think this photo illustrates how helpful that reading buddy is! Trying to teach him how to cut!
Seriously adorable idea brought to you again by my teaching partner. This is the adorableness it produced:
I love these 3 pictures. It illustrates that even though this was a teacher planned activity-there was plenty of room for interpretation. Each of them looked differently then the others. The body of the turkey is made from the child's traced feet (with shoes on in our case). The feathers-we precut some and the kids had to cut some. The eyes were chosen by them from a googly eye bucket. This is the poem that was attached:
I take ZERO credit in writing that cute little poem. But I also can't say who did as I am not too sure!
The Thanksgiving books really opened up for us a window to teach these children about this holiday!
They made food in the playdough center that they could take to Thanksgiving dinner (their idea!), and the donating of the food to the food bank-really came at a great time to wrap it up! :)
Happy Thanksgiving Canadian Readers! I hope you had a seriously blessed holiday! I'm off to enjoy an Oktoberfest Parade with my family and some favorite friends! :)
Gobble Gobble
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