Thanksgiving Threw Up in My Classroom

OH.MY.  Pretty much sums up how I feel when I walk into my classroom.  I’m greeted by dangling turkeys, pilgrims galore, and kid work all over the place…and I LOVE IT.  Y’all…this last month…3 weeks, I guess…have been a total whirlwind.  I didn’t get a chance to do half the things I wanted to, but I’m okay with it because the kids got JUST what they needed!  We’ve been furiously preparing ourselves for our annual Grandparent’s/VIP day tomorrow.  It’s our biggest event of the year!  The kids get to invite the special people in their lives to come watch them perform the most darling little musical routine.  This year the theme is 50’s.  LOVE.  After the performance, all the families are invited back to the classrooms to browse around and take a look at all the fun things the kids are learning.  We’ve been learning SO much and we’re so excited to show it off!  Here’s a little peek at what our V.I.P’s will see tomorrow….

This past week we read the story, “I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie”, by Allison Jackson.  Of course, the kids loved it and there was SO much we could do with it!!  We created a little reader’s response writing craftivity to go along with the story.  LOVED the way these turned out!!! 

Their writing prompt was, ‘If I were the old lady, I would swallow a…’.  They had to write their choice of Thanksgiving fare :)  I got pumpkin rolls, turkeys, yellow cake?!, green beans, mashed ‘butatoes’, rolls, etc.  SO fun!  After they wrote their sentence, they made a little old lady with googly eyes and a hand drawn picture of the food of their choice. 

Last week we read “The Amazing Turkey Race!” and did this little craftivity for a readers response…

Loving the one that says, “Eat more loins.”  Of course, it’s supposed to say “lions”.  Makes me chuckle every time I walk in the room :)

Of course, we’ve also been talking a lot about being thankful and what that means.   We created these little pilgrims to hold our ‘thankful writing’ {inspired by First Grade Blue Skies :)}.  The kids were thankful for the funniest things…corn dogs, Christmas, biscuits?!…TOO cute!

I noticed that this poor little pilgrim lost his head :(  Oooops!

We did our “How to Catch a Turkey” writing {printable from Deanna Jump’s Thanksgiving Math & Literacy Unit}.  We read “Run, Turkey, Run!” before our writing and I LOVED the way the kids made the connection between this how-to and the how-to we wrote when we made root beer floats on the 50th day! 

The kids get to take home their placemats tomorrow before they leave for the break.  We had our Thanksgiving feast the other day and it was PRECIOUS.  A whole buncha pilgrims and Indians just feastin’ away :) 

SO…the room’s all ready for our VIPS…

And I’m SO excited for my kids to show off ALL their hard work!!!!  It’s been a BUSY 3 weeks!!!

**I get lots of questions asking, “How do you fit EVERYTHING in?!?!?”.  Ummm…LOTS of planning!  HA!  Seriously…most of the writing you see is either completed during our Writer’s Workshop block {followed by draft book} OR they complete it at the writing station during our Daily 5/literacy block.  All the craftivities are pre-cut {BLESS my sweet student teacher!!!!}, so all the kids have to do is assemble the parts.  This usually takes a total of maybe 10-12{ish} minutes.  We can fit that in while they’re eating snack or when we get back in the room from lunch.  It’s just a matter of planning it and making sure that it all fits with our objectives.  We made our placemats during our Social Studies block of time because that took a lot longer!!!Hope that answers your questions!!**