Thanksgiving week (or any short week for that matter) tend to be weeks where I am a little more laid back, less structured in my teaching.  I save all those fun projects and ideas for these weeks and they always turn out to be great!

Today for example, we did not follow our day through our regular routine.  There were parts of it here and there.

We began our day by doing calendar and then we updated our binders.  I then read the children the Legend of the Bluebonnet by Tomie DePaola.  I then remembered that I was able to find the movie of the Legend of the Indian Paintbrush (Reading Rainbow style) so we watched that and learned a little bit about Native American way of life.  We then shifted to the Pilgrims and we looked over our Scholastic News about chores that pilgrim children did.  We also looked at the Pilmoth Plantation website ( http://www.plimoth.org) and shared thoughts with each other about what we saw. 

We then totally changed subjects and we all cut apart newspaper to create more bedding for our composting bin.  I read a book last night that told me how to get rid of the gnats and I hope this works!  

We then had our usual Literacy Work Stations, lunch, and indoor recess.

After that, we worked on creating our Pilgrim girl bonnets and our Native American headdresses for our Thanksgiving Meal tomorrow in our Dining Room.  I will take some pictures of that tomorrow.  Here are some of them in creation: 

These are the bonnets–very easy to make, just cut two slits about halfway up the page and 1/3 of the way in on each side.  Take the two end flaps and turn them so they are parallel to the middle flap and staple.  Punch two holes in the sides that are left and tie with string.

These are easy too!  Trace three feathers, have the children cut “fringes” in the sides of the feathers to make them look more feathery and then staple to a decorated sentence strip.  I taught the boys how to draw some Native American symbols (just Google it!) and they decorated the strips that way.  I’ve also had them glue on patterns with foam seasonal shapes as well and that works great too. 

One thing we still might do is to make “wampum” necklaces this year.  Large macaroni, dyed with rubbing alcohol and food coloring and strung on necklaces.  We also did not make Pilgrim Boy Hats this year–they wanted to be Native Americans! 🙂

We then had a convocation and went home!  Busy, busy day! 

See you tomorrow!

Kristen 🙂