Hip Homeschool Hop: Thanksgiving

This week I am once again linking up to The Hip Homeschool Hop.  To tell you the truth, I have been forgetting to, oops.  Anyhow, this week a post was suggested:

Tell us about your Thanksgiving traditions and/or 
how you're incorporating Thanksgiving into your homeschool this week.

I have had different Thanksgiving traditions throughout the years.  My older children were used to going to my ex husbands grandmother's house and being surrounded by a huge family of aunts, uncles, cousins etc.  We would eat a huge meal and then of course some would lounge around watching football.  After my divorce I had every other Thanksgiving with my children and we would try to get done to my mother's house for a meal, just her and us.  Now that God has provided me with a great husband and we have 3 young children we are sort of trying to find our Thanksgiving tradition.  I still have my older children every other Thanksgiving (this year they are with their dad).  Because my husband works night shift we have to work around his schedule.  He doesn't work Thanksgiving night, but because he works the night before we will be having our Thanksgiving dinner at the regular time for dinner.  

For Thanksgiving we like to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade on TV.  I grew up going to this parade because we lived in Queens, NY (that is one of the 5 boroughs of NY for anyone who doesn't know). It was just a train ride into Manhattan that was required to join in the festivities  and crowd to watch the parade.  My mother actually used to stay home to prepare the meal and she watched the parade on TV.  Now that I watch it on TV myself I can see the benefits of this way.  Unless you happen to be at Macy's in Manhattan you don't get to see the performances.  As a child, I didn't really care, but now, I love watching them (usually, depends who they have).

A new activity we are doing this year and I would love for it to become a tradition, is the Thankfulness Turkey banner. I printed out turkeys on yellow, red and orange paper and each day we think of something else we are thankful for, following alphabetical order.  I am going to hang them up in our "archway" to help decorate. As of now we are using them during our calendar time/prayer time to pray for specific things we are thankful for.

We have also read a couple of  "first" Thanksgiving stories and are talking about the pilgrims and indians.  Though I am reading a book about the true Thanksgiving and have had my eyes opened about our traditions.  Gotta finish the book so I can share my review.

The girls will be helping me prepare some of the foods for the meal tomorrow and Thursday.