throughout the week, children were invited to bring their favorite food to show us, tell us about, and even taste.
our feasts definitely grew in size over the week.
eating our ice milk from i week and tasting ms. vilia’s indonesian food was a special treat.
after reading and counting along with feast for ten, we praciticed thanksgiving feast table manners. quiet voices, pleases and thank yous abounding, and lots of brave tasting of new foods.
happy thanksgiving, all!
i didn’t even realize that we had over 50 candlestick holders (i thought they were just random wood knobs, etc) in the box from the thrift shop.
so i threw out the project plans i had and we decorated candlestick holders for our thanksgiving feast table.
we colored them with crayons and painted them with watercolors.
the candles were made by rolling and taping a piece of construction paper.
then after we washed hands and came to the table, we took a piece of tissue paper and lit the candles!
My own son, Micah, a first grader, thought since we didn’t have a letter of the week, i should teach the kids the chunk TH.
good idea. for chunks and compound words, we use our fists and chant:
this is T, this is H, pound them together TH (here we make the sound)
in honor of thanksgiving, we make turkey hands. i don’t know how many years we’ve done this, but it is so fun to see how different they all look!
the child picks the color of paints to use and the teacher paints her hand. this is naturally an intimate way for the teacher and child to connect. for the child who doesn’t want her hand painted, we trace it with pencil and then paint it in.
then the teacher turns the handprint into a turkey with a few strokes of the marker and a red paint blob!
we have our little poem printed on the paper as well:
this poem has turned into a big body experience with our hands up over our heads and we say “so many feathers on our back” instead of “4 little feathers….” when we say “…and then i take a nap” the children fall to the floor and act like a sleeping turkey until the alarm clock rings.
i love being able to call them my turkeys.
i love finding “proof of learning” in the classroom or hearing about it from families.
i found this on the table one day…completed by a young three year old during work time. ahhhh.
with rolls of thrifted white fabric, we turned one of our cozy corners into an igloo.
the roof didn’t last terribly long, but that way there was more fabric to be used as “snow blankets.”
we also did a 2 part project one day.
when children arrived, they come to the project table to help snip white strips of paper. we made the strips wide enough so that it would require more than one snip to cut off a piece. if we saw children struggling with this, we cut the strip the long way so all they had to do was make one snip and ta-da! an ice block!
then later in the day, we glued the ice blocks into an igloo shape.
some igloos were just the outline and others were filled in completely.
newcreationpreschool.com 