My district gave us the WHOLE WEEK off this year to celebrate Thanksgiving, which meant we had to fit in lots of turkey fun in a shorter amount of time. One of our favorite activities was our Turkey Dressing activity which went with this book:
In this book, the little farm turkey dresses up as different animals so he can be disguised for Thanksgiving and not be eaten. After reading this book we dressed up turkeys and wrote speech bubbles describing our disguises.
After activating our schema, we read my book from my Playful Pumpkins unit on TPT.
We then added more to our chart and explored our pumpkins at our tables to create our properties wall. Students had to draw, color, and label their pumpkins. All of our pumpkins were so unique thanks to a local pumpkin patch. My cuties were AMAZED that we had a star-shaped, yellow pumpkin!
The next day we learned the pumpkin; life cycle with this much-loved book.
Then we created the life cycle with paper necklaces of a seed, vine, yellow flower, green pumpkin, and orange pumpkin.
Once these cuties understood the cycle of a pumpkin's life, we created this little craftivity.
No pumpkin week could e complete without a sink or float prediction.
These little cuties also explored the inside of a pumpkin to learn the pumpkin parts. We added the parts to baggies with labels to hang in our dramatic play pumpkin patch.
Here is our little craftivity to understand the pumpkin parts.
Friday ended our week of pumpkin fun with a Venn diagram comparing apples to pumpkins, which led to writing sentences and making a little paper craft pumpkin. (This might have been when my principal strolled through for a walk-through - I love when she sees us writing so well!)
For our small 20 minutes of free choice centers, we transformed our dramatic play center into a pumpkin patch. I love hearing the conversations about "buying pumpkins" and using the names of coins that were learned at calendar. My cuties also used scales in this center to weigh the pumpkins and had garden tools to grow pumpkins. Their conversations about the life cycle were priceless and made this little teacher's heart sooooooo happy!
We added a pumpkin to blocks center for hamming golf tees into and a pumpkin for art center to add play-do faces to.
In math, we were learning about 3D shapes and made a different shape each day. On Monday we made pumpkin spheres from this little freebie.
On Tuesday our cubes were created with toothpicks and spice drops.
...and, of course, we enjoyed the Teacher Tipster 3D chants. (He is awesome!)
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