Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!  I know we did. I am a little late in getting this post out, but as they say:  better late than never!

The week of Thanksgiving I knew we wouldn't really be doing "school" since we had family coming into town on Wednesday.  I wanted to take advantage of Monday and Tuesday though, and since we worked on letter T the week before I thought it would be a great time to talk about the "th" sound.  Little Guy came up with all the words he could think of that started with the "th" sound, and we did a couple of Thanksgiving projects.

We started off by making a turkey out of an old popcorn bottle.

"Uh, oh!"

We glued on some feathers, googly eyes, and a beak, and tada!  Our turkey!

We also played our "Save the Turkeys" game.....a LOT!  I made a game board similar to our Halloween game (which you can find HERE).  This time the objective was to help the turkeys escape the farm to the forest before Thanksgiving.  For the game pieces I opened paperclips to an "L" shape, hot glued a pompom onto them, then hot glued a "fan" of pipe cleaners to the back of the pompom for feathers.  Such fun, and great for working on Little Guy's sportsmanship.  Here's a pic of Little Guy playing the game with his Dad.

While browsing Pinterst, I came across the most adorable Oreo cookie turkeys and knew they would be the perfect project for Little Guy to help me make.  As it turned out, I ended up making them while Little Guy just gorged himself on the ingredients.  Now, the blog that the pinterst link too me too was great, but the directions for making the turkeys were pretty lacking.  I found a much better set of directions at The Idea Room.

I thought it was pretty hilarious that this one came out with a drip down its eye, like it was crying because it would be eaten!

And eaten it was!!


* I shyed away from discussing the story of Thanksgiving with my Little Guy this year.  We just talked about how Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on all that you are thankful for.  I didn't want to get into the whole Pilgrims and "Indians" thing, mainly because it's untrue.  Well, not entirely untrue, but definitely painted in a much different way than the actual events.  One of the main reasons we've decided to do homeschooling, is because I want my child to grow up to be a free, clear thinker.  Yes, it's cute to make an "indian" vest or a pilgrim hat, but I feel like it's an injustice to my child to teach him inaccuracies, or to turn a real part of history into a fictional cartoon-like event that portrays an image that is untrue.  Don't get me wrong, there are some great lessons about overcoming hardships, and getting along with people of other cultures, and being thankful for what you have in the Thanksgiving story; but in my opinion, the Pilgrims were not quite the heroes they are made out to be.  I do not feel that my son, at age four needs to know about the massacres and injustices of the Native American people; but I do feel that one day he does need to know about it.  So until then, we will leave the Pilgrims and "Indians" out of our Thanksgiving. 

If you are interested in reading a little about the story of Thanksgiving from the Native American perspective, this site has a summarized version.  The Real Story of Thanksgiving
(I guess you can see I have a soft spot for the Native American Peoples). 

This week we read:

"Franklin's Thanksgiving" by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark