Learning About Thanksgiving!

We've spent most of the week continuing to talk about Thanksgiving.  Zoey is putting the finishing touches on her turkey head.

Suri adds the beak too.  This was actually a complicated procedure.  The children first had to draw a triangle on a folded piece of paper.  Then cut it out, but don't cut on the fold.  When they glued, the glue could only go on one half......many directions to remember and follow. 
Three step directions are often tricky and we try to give the children practice with this.  Sometimes we do it in silly ways...."Walk to the table, make a funny face, put your hands on top of your head"  You can try this at home too!

In art class the children made talking sticks.  Look at all the twisting and wrapping involved, so there is a lot of fine motor coordination needed.

We now have some champion corn shuckers in our class.

The Wampanoag Indians were the tribe the Pilgrims celebrated with at the first Thanksgiving.  These Indians really used walking sticks in their daily life.  The sticks helped the Indians navigate through the forests or dig up shellfish along the sandy coast.  We're making our version here.

The children cut out either a circle, rectangle or triangle (good review of these shape names).

They chose paper and then cut that into small pieces.

They glued on feathers and the colorful pieces of paper.



Every walking stick had the tribe member's name.  The children chose an activity they like to do and something they could see in nature.





You can see the children are interested in  the names their friends chose.  Find out what  your child chose by looking at our new bulletin board.



Since the Indians had no written language, pictures were used to tell stories or record events.  Each child selected a picture and then had to draw it on their own paper.  Finally they copied the word that identified the picture.  We'll use these papers to tell some stories next week.



Both Pilgrims and Indians went fishing.  We've made this a little more challenging by having the children balance on blocks!



Jake was excited  when he said, "I got an F for fish."

That gourd is still around and this time Zoey decided to take some yarn to wrap around the nails.  Charlotte soon joined Zoey at the table.  They spent over 30 minutes cutting the yarn, wrapping it, and chatting together.  It's an important developmental step to see that children can lengthen the time they spend engaged with friends on one activity.

Magna tile building

We have added the descriptive words diagonal and vertical to our caterpillar number line.   We gave the children wikki stix and had them demonstrate that they knew what these words meant.  Great job Daniel! 

Of course they all wanted more sticks so they could make designs.

"I think I need more!"

Sometimes we just hang out!