The month of November is all about being thankful and kindergarten Thanksgiving activities. We spend the month working with the activities included in our Thanksgiving Research Project! This project incorporates reading, research, writing, vocabulary, and higher-order thinking skills. Our kindergarten Thanksgiving activities include a lot of art projects and snacks.
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Turkeys
All of our research projects, we’ll kick things off with our schema map which outlines what we already know. Thanksgiving in kindergarten always makes me chuckle because some of their ideas are hilarious. We’ll keep this schema map and as we complete our research project, we will add new learning and address any misconceptions.
As we work through our research and writing, we record all of our learning in our research journals!
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Read Alouds
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Our research is conducted using read-alouds and videos, and all of our learning is recorded on the included graphic organizers. The students then use these charts that we make as a whole group to do their individual drawing/writing!
The labeling activities are a great opportunity for explicit vocabulary instruction.
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Being Thankful
Our major focus during this time is being thankful. We discuss the things we are thankful for and write about being thankful! Afterall, that is what Thanksgiving is all about. In kindergarten it is important that our students can relate to the feeling of being thankful.
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Needs And Wants
As part of our kindergarten Thanksgiving activities, we also discuss needs and wants!
We learn about needs and wants and create an anchor chart. Then we use magazines to find items and sort them as needs and wants. As we sort we discuss why it’s a need or want.
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Art Projects
Some of our favorite kindergarten Thanksgiving activities are the turkey art projects!
The kids paint paper plates and add eyes, beak, wattle to make paper plate turkeys.
Rainbow turkeys! Students cut out a circle. I provide them precut strips. We curl the strips and glue them onto the circle. Add details.
These hanging turkeys are my all-time favorite! They’re easy and they’re messy and they look great hanging from the ceiling! Yahoo.com even listed them as their NUMBER ONE turkey fail! TRUE STORY!
We love directed drawings and these turkeys were so simple!
Kids and families love any art project with hands and feet and we love these footprint turkeys. After painting the foot, the kids add feathers and details!
One of our favorite turkey projects is our sight word turkey! We assess the kids based on their sight words, and they get a feather for every word they know! They’re encouraged to read the words by sight or use their sounds to decode the words! Then they use their feathers to make a turkey! This project also allows us to have some great chats about sight words and what we can do to learn more words! And we even talk about how we’re thankful for the words we can read!
And seriously, everyone needs turkey leg hats! Paper bags, newspaper, and an epic Thanksgiving hat!
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Costumes
The suit is from OppoSuits!
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: Snacks
Of course, we have food as part of our Thanksgiving learning!
Ranch and peppers!
Sugar cookie, frosting, candy corn, icing and candy eyes!
And who doesn’t want to eat Turkey Droppings and Turkey Claws?
We end our Thanksgiving celebration with Stone Soup! First, we read different versions of the story, and each child brings in a can of vegetables. We talk about how we can do beautiful work if we all work together. Everyone adds their veggies to the soup, and I add the stone. When we sit down to eat, the stone soup picks a very special and deserving student to get the stone! We even make our own butter using heavy whipping cream and salt!
Kindergarten Thanksgiving Activities: FREE RESOURCES
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