We have been having a little fun getting it all together for our Thanksgiving feast this coming week. It is one of my all time favorite events in Kindergarten. We have slowly been putting together our Thanksgiving Story Retelling Place Mats and I have to say that we all can retell this story like we have known it all along. Hand motions and all, we have it! And as we have been discussing family traditions and customs we have had a lot of fun in our home center. In fact, a hot mess of fun!
We are going to keep this image small...for obvious reasons! Seriously what is a Kinder teacher to do when looking at this at dismissal? I say pick your battles my friends. Just shut the door and walk away because it is too upsetting to look at. I shut the door and my eye twitched all the way home... Between here and there I had to make a plan and quick because the mere thought of looking at this again made me light headed.
So, casually the next day we started talking about family celebrations again. And we learned that most every family celebration includes some kind of food. And I pulled our home center into the center of the room and asked if this were our "home" would it be ready for any kind of celebration.
The children decided that it would be a good idea to spruce up our home center because it was not ready for...anything! But we have had some fun sorting and organizing and actually deciding what props we wanted in our home center.
It did not take long for us to get some momentum and the conversations were lively as we organized and made decisions on what to keep and toss. It was interesting to see the different roles that each person took on for this project. Who knew problem solving could be so much fun?
We still are working on gathering some props because we decided that we wanted to create a Feast for 10! We had to borrow a few items and I am gathering a few more but by Monday we begin creating a Feast for 10! I seriously can't wait.
As I was thinking about the next week I remembered that a few of the children were talking about the place mats we have been making for the feast. They wanted to use the mats in the home center when recreating a Feast for 10. I decided to make some smaller place mats so that the children could use them in the home center.
Just print these on colored cardstock and laminate and you have a quick and easy prop for your home center too! If you need a copy for your friends just click on the image above and grab your freebie!
Well the Thanksgiving work is finally winding down and we still have part of next week to go! But we were happy to be able to stay inside today and have our Feast For 10! This was one of those rare times that I was actually able to participate and even listen from afar as the play based activity was taking place. As you can imagine our conversations were lively and it was interesting to see the different roles that the children tried out as they prepared for the feast. I almost wished that I had a checklist with me as the children were working because they covered a lot of the things that have been discussed in class from Language Arts to Math to Social Studies. It was a real joy to hear several retellings of Feast For 10, tons of how many, one more and two more and how different children celebrate at their own homes. Since we have incorporated more books into our home center, it has been interesting to see how they use them in this area. I asked why they were on the table and at their feast and the children told me that they needed them... Everyone that came to their feast just needed a book to read! I suppose they now know that reading is a part of our daily lives and reading has purpose... What teacher would not want that message to be loud and clear even in a home center?
One of my new favorites this year has been our I Am Thankful For... writing activity. We generated a simple list of the things we were thankful for and used the word and picture list to complete our feathers for our turkey headbands and a card we made for our families.
Like I said, this was super simple and it gave us a chance to talk about making lists as a writing choice and we were able to use this to help with making cards for our families. As we were talking and discussing Thanksgiving and our families the children continued to come up with things that they were thankful for and I will be excited to revise this list because we are getting better and a little more descriptive...
And as I was driving home from school one day I thought about...time. Sometimes I think we are in such a hurry to teach it all that it is hard to allow for more...time. Time to let things simmer in our heads and time to rethink and revisit so that we get to a deeper understanding. During one of our last discussions I asked why many of us were thankful for trees. And with a little help of a sentence stem the list all of the sudden became a lot more interesting and descriptive.
Considering we still go to school next week we have time to work on more writing with more detail. Sometimes, it just takes a little more, time. I will let you know how it goes!
And before our rainy day was over we had a chance to make a gift for our families. We made simple hand print turkeys. You would be surprised to know just how many descriptive words were used during this simple project. I heard squishy, wiggly, cold and wet to name a few! Maybe this follow up activity needs to be a shared writing activity and we could make a list of those words! Hmmm...
If you are in school next week and need a little Thanksgiving free fun just click on the images to get yours just to make your classroom Thanksgiving a Thanksgiving to remember...
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