Thanksgiving 2013 in Homeschool Kindergarten

I'm about a week late posting this, but here's a look at some of the activities we did in Homeschool Kindergarten leading up to Thanksgiving.  I started off the week by having the girls read Pete the Cat: The First Thanksgiving and watching The Mayflower Voyages (Charlie Brown).  Then we made this cute Mayflower craft from Family Fun magazine.  The girls helped me cut the base out of a paper back and the sails out of white printer paper.  They enjoyed decorating the ships and writing messages on the sails - E wrote "Give to others" and L wrote "Friend".  Throughout the week we wrote the things we were thankful for on little strips of paper and put them in the boats.  Here's more of what we did..

After we made our Mayflower boats, the girls spelled words ending in "-oat".

I found an amazing activity packet on pilgrims and Native Americans from Scholastic for $1, but we were only able to fit in a couple of the activities like making a paper diorama of the "Old World" and the "New World".

I tried to integrate Thanksgiving-themed worksheets throughout the week to make the holiday feel special.

The girls enjoyed a little lesson on drawing turkeys..

Didn't they turn out cute?  The girls also put together these turkey crafts:

 

Honestly, it was a little challenging to get the kids to focus on Thanksgiving since we had already put up our Christmas decorations and they were constantly begging to make Christmas ornaments.  To top it off, I was trying to teach them about Hanukkah at the same time, so I think they got their holidays all mixed up.  We read a story in an old issue of Highlights High Five about a family that puts candles in their Pumpkin Pie, so that confused them about Thanksgivukkah even more!  But I think, given the circumstances and the fact that my girls are only 4, I did a decent job of giving them a small taste of what Thanksgiving is all about..