Turkey Day

I have fallen a week behind in my posting.  I will be graduating from my master's program in a few weeks (YAY!!) so I have been a little busy finishing up things for that.  So, I will post what we did last week next week some time since this week was a Thanksgiving theme.  This week I abandoned the NYPL list and simply did Thanksgiving themed books.  Our letter of the day was T for Thanksgiving, Turkey, and Thursday - talk about getting a lot out of that one!

The first book we read was What is Thanksgiving by Harriet Ziefert.  This is a fairly good, informative book about Thanksgiving.  Little mouse asks questions (just like most of my story time friends) and gets a brief overview of Thanksgiving.  It is a great overview for a big crowd and it has lift-the-flap pages to add a little to the illustrations.

Our second book was Thank you Thanksgiving by David Milgrim.  This is a very simple, short book with a little girl who says lots of thank yous.  It is nice because you can talk about things you are thankful for, as well as how you tanks others when they do something nice for you.  Perfect for the theme.

The final book we read was Over the river: a turkey's tale by Derek Anderson.  This book was ok.  I think it may have been better if I sang the song.  I didn't because that makes it harder to talk about the pictures, but they seemed ok with it.


Turkey songs are really hard to find, but we dug up a few.  The Wiggles have a song called Turkey in the straw so we did that with shaker eggs.  I had the kids act like turkeys and then shake their eggs around, so that was fun.

We also sang Ron Brown's Turkey Trot (originally I had Dr. Jean's Gobble! Gobble! here, but that didn't go so well with the Monday crowd.)  This song has you trotting around like turkeys some more, but the music is really up beat and he tells you a few things to do, like pull your hands in and stick your wings out.

Our last song was Laurie Berkner's She'll be coming 'round the mountain.  This is a good song and it fit with the idea of relatives coming to visit.  We had lots of parents/grandparents singing along with this one and the actions are easy for the 2's and 3's.

We also did a fun flannel song.  I found a song called Did you ever see a turkey? that made a perfect flannel story.  I posted it on my blog here where you can see what we did.  The kids and parents all LOVED it!

The craft was a cute toilet paper roll turkey.  Luckily, we have a die cut for the hand print that made up the feathers.  The kids were too young to cut out their own hand print, but that could be fun with older kids.