Play School - Thanksgiving

Are you as busy as I am???  I should be making a cheesecake right now but I figure I'll relax for a few minutes and write this post instead.  :)  It has been a busy week for us what with cooking for 13 people and all, but I am happy to say I did make some time for Play School, even if my children didn't seem to appreciate all my cute craft ideas for the week....

Books:

I had four Thanksgiving books out for the kids to read this week.

I really like Thanks for Thanksgiving by Julie Markes  but the boys both seemed to choose T is for Turkey as their favorite.  They are just really into the alphabet right now.

Activities:

I made up this button turkey for the boys to play with this week.

It was really quick and easy.  I just used some felt and a few colorful buttons I picked up at the craft store.  I used fabric glue to attach the face and head to the turkey and hand sewed the buttons on.  I then glued a second brown circle on the back to keep the (messy) button stitching away from prying fingers.

I cut a small slit in each of the feathers so they could be buttoned on by the boys....in theory.

The boys really loved this turkey and bring it to me several times a day but neither can button the feathers on yet. They do great with the color matching aspect though and are very accurate identifying their colors now.
I got my inspiration for this here and here.

The other activity we "attempted" to do were M&M turkeys.  I found this great printable (4 turkeys to a page) and colored them in a bit myself since I wanted the kids to focus on the candy placing aspect of the activity.  I gave each boy a fun size bag of M&M's left over from Halloween and showed them how to place one candy on each circle.  Great idea for working on fine motor skills but they really just wanted to eat the candy.  sigh.  How can I blame them?  M&M's are just too delicious.

Crafts:

We really failed in the craft department this week too, lol.  First I attempted the classic hand print turkeys.  After watching Grammy demo getting her hand painted and putting it on the paper Aaron was willing to be painted but he didn't want to put his hand down!  So he just smeared it all around.  Sigh again.

Alex was not going to let me paint his hand so he went to town with a brush instead.

The next day I figured I'd take one more stab at Turkey making.  This time I decorated two pine cones with some googly eyes and scraps of felt and tried to get the boys to let me trace their hands on construction paper for the feathers.  Aaron agreed but only after being bribed with more M&M's.  Alex wouldn't even do it for candy!  SIGH.

I made two copies of Aaron's hand just to finish my poor naked second turkey.  They are pretty cute though.

As usual, everything didn't go as intended... BUT we had fun.  And I am very grateful to have such fun little boys.

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!