with our hands-turned-turkeys, the return of turkey rob and conversations of home, we anticipated thanksgiving.

turkey rob’s rainbow feathers were plucked and “planted” every day. when his red “gobble maker” fell off, it was repaired with candy corn duct tape. he had a lot of love this year.  and he was the centerpiece for all our show and tell times:

this year children could have a teacher paint their hands to make a turkey print or they could paint their own. we used regular watercolors and it worked great.

families: you can ask your child if it tickled or not…that was the biggest topic of conversation.

since it was H week and all our thanksgiving themed books depicted families in homes, we had some school conversations about our homes. we reenacted the three little pigs (not my idea, but someone remembered it from LAST YEAR…and it was just what we needed to do that day anyway!). we made a house of leaves to act as our house of sticks:

following our homes conversations, i asked what they knew about our community’s homeless shelter and what they thought it meant to be homeless.  some of the oldest kids in the classes remember when we had a preschool friend who was living at the shelter and that he brought a suitcase with him every day. some of the kids have volunteered at the shelter with their families and churches. some children equated homelessness with camping.  i thought the collection of thoughts was pretty touching.  perhaps my favorite is the suggestion that homeless people are brave. indeed.

these were genuine conversations. not even the phrases about pooping and peeing were funny…just serious and authentic. we’ve sent this letter to our community’s homeless shelter which works so hard at not only providing shelter for people, but helping people move out of homelessness.

and families, stay tuned:  we will be collecting things for the harvey county homeless shelter as a christmas project.