Thanksgiving Crafts for Toddlers and Preschoolers

I realize Thanksgiving is over, but I wanted to share our Thanksgiving crafts. I was not very creative, so I found my ideas at other websites. Unfortunately, we didn't get all our crafts completed. I was going to make them pilgrim girl hats to wear, but Tabitha didn't want one and I ran out of time being busy with Thanksgiving dinner, so I just gave it up. Why make it if she won't wear it? Here is the link where I found the pattern.

Our letter of the week is "M" so I started the week by talking about the Mayflower and the people who sailed over on it, the pilgrims. We colored a picture of the Mayflower, nothing spectacular, just a picture I found through searching Google. Later on in the week we started a Mayflower project, but once again it was one that didn't get completed. Found the idea here. We painted paper plates brown and blue. Boy was that an adventure: messy, messy, messy adventure. Here it is put together partially.

I also printed out Bible memory verses and a cornucopia of blessings from the same website, christianpreschoolprintables.com. Here the girls are working on their cornucopias. Tabitha did such a thorough job with her coloring.

I've always enjoyed making hand turkeys, you know trace your hand and the thumb is the turkey's head and the fingers are the turkey's tail feathers. I found a really cool alternative at thanksgiving.123holiday.net. I traced the girls' hands and then we drew on an eye and glued on a beak and a gobbler (or whatever the red thing hanging over the beak is called, I have always called it a gobbler). Then we took a drop of paint on each finger (one at a time) and used a paintbrush to spread in around. We sprinkled 4 different spices on the fingers. I used cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic and pepper. It smells really good.

Amelia was really into gluing the one day. So I printed out an outline of a turkey and ripped some yellow, red and orange construction paper up into some little rectangles and let them glue them to the turkey tail feathers.

I guess I should have started teaching them about Thanksgiving the week before so we would have had time to do all the activities I had planned. But we were trying to finish our ladybug lapbooks, which are still not quite done. In addition we have had way too many doctor/dentist appointments the last few weeks. Makes it hard to get things done. We did do our turkey countdown chart though. I can't remember where I found the idea, but I cut out a turkey body from brown construction paper and glued on a head (it needed a tab behind it to keep it from flopping down). Then I added 5 tail feathers so we could count down the days each morning. I like doing a countdown of only 5 days with them at this age. I had done the same thing with a football countdown chart when we were getting ready to go to the games. I figured that is far enough ahead for a 2 and 1 year old to anticipate. Each morning we took a feather off and thought of something we were thankful for. I wrote it down and we prayed. It was cute, the first thing Tabitha came up with that she was thankful for was her sister Amelia.

 

 

Now we can concentrate on finishing our ladybug lapbook (hopefully tomorrow) and working on the letter M. And of course getting ready for Christmas.