As the temperature gets cooler and the trees lose their leaves, American students begin to get excited about Thanksgiving. Teachers can use build upon this excitement to teach art, reading, math and writing lessons with a turkey theme.
Thankful Turkey Collage Bulletin Board
The teacher has everyone in the class bring in a photograph, drawing, or magazine picture depicting something he is thankful for. Each student shows his picture to the class and explains to the other students why he is grateful for it.
The teacher cuts the shape of a turkey out of a large piece of poster board. The students take turns gluing their images onto the turkey shape to create a thankful collage. The turkey is displayed on a bulletin board with the title, The Thankful Turkey.
Turkey Book and Reading Lesson
Over the River: A Turkey’s Tale illustrated by Derek Anderson [Little Simon, 2007]is a comical twist on the traditional song by Lydia Marie Child. In this story a turkey family is on their way to grandmother’s house instead of a human family.
Primary teachers can use the colorful illustrations in the story to model how to use pictures make predictions about a story and the included song by Child to have students compare and contrast the plot of Anderson’s book to the original.
Use Turkey Feathers to Teach Math Patterns
The teacher creates turkey math manipulatives for each student in the class. The turkeys are made of a small and large Styrofoam ball glued together to form the head and body of the turkey and then spray painted brown. Orange pipe cleaners are cut and glued to the bottom of the body to represent feet and a face is drawn on the head with permanent markers.
Bags of colorful craft feathers are used to create math patterns. The teacher sticks feathers into the Styrofoam turkey to model how to create different patterns. The students practice making the math patterns on their turkeys.
Turkey Themed Writing Prompts
During Writer’s Workshop or journal time teachers can use turkey themed writing prompts to encourage creative writing.
- Farm turkeys are birds that can’t fly. Pretend you are a young turkey that wants to fly. What kinds of things will you do to try to fly? Who will help you? Will you learn to fly?
- If you were a turkey what are five things you would be thankful for? Why?
- In the year 2020 researchers have found that turkey feathers have magical properties. What magical things can turkey feathers do? How does the magic happen?
A Thanksgiving themed turkey unit is a fun way for elementary teachers to get students excited about reading, writing and math concepts. During November teachers can also teach students to write Thanksgiving how-to paragraphs and Thanksgiving poems as part of a Thanksgiving thematic unit.
Megan Sheakoski - Megan Sheakoski is a teacher, mom and writer whose ideas have been featured in college text books, graduate courses, on websites and on ...
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