Thanksgiving

Hey ya'll! It's Jodi here.  Just wanted to try out the new blog again.  I am trying to figure out what all these buttons mean!  I thought I would share some of my Thanksgiving activities with everyone while figuring it all out.  Hope everyone had a safe and blessed Thanksgiving Holiday!

Jodi's Class

All of the kindergarten classes participate in a Thanksgiving feast.  We sit all together as a grade and eat lunch that day. Every class creates a Thanksgiving place mat and some sort of hat or costume for this day.  Some classes have on pilgrim costumes, some have Indian costumes, and some wear turkey hats.  We created our place mats whole group one afternoon.  I had students glue squares in a pattern going across the top of the construction paper.  (I use long construction paper.)  Students colored their letters and glued them onto the squares to spell the words "Give Thanks".  I pre-cut the squares and feathers.  I demonstrated how to cut a large circle for the body and a small circle for the head, and the students cut the pieces for the turkey.  They added the beak, waddle, and eyes.  Once all the glue was dry (some students get very glue happy, so I had to wait until the next day), I asked each student to tell me what they were thankful for and wrote it on the feathers.  A variation to this would be to let the students wrote his/her responses on the feathers themselves.  I had these laminated so they would last at least through the lunch!  They turned out super cute!  Some of the responses were just priceless!!

Jodi's Class

These are our Indian costumes we made.   The vests are made out of bulletin board paper (you can also make them out of brown paper bags).  Using bulletin board paper is a lot easier and faster than using the brown grocery bags in my opinion.  I pre-cut the vests and feathers for the hats.  I ran off pattern block shapes on colored copy paper.  The students were instructed to glue the blocks into a pattern on the front and back of the vest.  We also had learned about Indian symbols and their meanings.  The students used markers to draw the Indian symbols on their vest.  We discussed Indian names, and they came up with his/her own Indian name.  I wrote the name they created on the vest for them.  The hats are made out of sentence strips, construction paper feathers, and foam stickers in the shapes of leaves.  I normally have students glue pattern blocks around the headband, but I had a student donate these stickers to my class.  She kept asking me what we were going to do with them, so I decided to let them use them on the headband.  They loved wearing these!  I even had some wear them school the next day!  

Hey Kinder Krazies!  This is Jamie.  My class is called Mrs. Jamie's Jitterbugs!  From day one, these students are told they are the best!  I believe it and so do they!! Since Jodi and I are just starting this blog, I thought I would share some of the things that we have done over the past few weeks.  I hope you enjoy!

Here is a pic of my Jitterbugs!  I recently was able to get a book donated to each child from another organization.  This was a picture that we took thanking them for our books!

Brace map of our pumpkins!

Every year we make place mats for our Thanksgiving Feast.  Ours are actually glyphs so that each student's mat is different.

 These are our Thanksgiving hats! We were the turkeys! I saw these hats on Kinderbykim.com years ago.  I just love them!

 These are our water color scarecrows that we made.  The Jitterbugs did an awesome job!  Later, they completed the sentence by writing about when they are scared and created their own scarecrow from construction paper.

Yea! I think Jodi and I are starting to get the hang of this ole' blog idea:)