Thanksgiving

To be completely honest, I did not really want to do a Thanksgiving theme this year.  The books we have are either totally racially inappropriate (i.e. Pilgrims and Indians) or just boring.  My boss ordered some new Thanksgiving books (none of which I ended up using), but it did give me a little boost so I did do Thanksgiving again.  Next year, probably not.

BOOKS:

We read The Thankful Book by Todd Parr and A Feast for Ten by Cathryn Falwell.

Things I liked: neither of these books is specifically about THANKSGIVING – as in a holiday with some fairly mythologized origins.  It makes me super squicky to talk about Pilgrims and Indians (INDIANS, not Native Americans either).  I felt super betrayed in college and high school when I found out that the first Thanksgiving probably didn’t happen and that Columbus was a giant douche who basically committed genocide so I don’t really want to be teaching small children revisionist history.  I like that the books are about being thankful and about being with families.  I LOVE the illustrations in Feast for 10 and the fact that it helps us with counting.

Things I didn’t like: Neither of the books tell a linear story.  My storytime kids like action and excitement apparently.  They didn’t love either of these two books.  I really couldn’t find a book that was about Thanksgiving that was also interesting.  I’m going to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day around Thanksgiving next year instead.

FINGERPLAY:

Between the first and second book, we did a little fingerplay that we had done last year – Mr. Turkey.

Mr. Turkey’s tail is big and wide (spread fingers)
He swings it when he walks (swing hands)
His neck is long (stretch neck)
His chin is red (stroke chin)
And he gobbles when he talks (open and close hands, and gobbles)

We did the fingerplay twice.  Once where I modeled it, and once for them to participate.

SONG:

There really aren’t any good Thanksgiving songs either.  I put on “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House” by John Lithgow because it fit the best to me.  I pulled out the shakers and everyone was happy because everyone is happy when they have a shaker.

RAFT:

We made turkeys out of coffee filters and construction paper.  I like turkeys.  I liked the paper bag turkey puppets we made last year, but wasn’t ready to repeat yet.  Here’s one of mine.