Thanksgiving Activities

Whenever there's a holiday, we like to do things connected to the holiday whether it's reading books, watching movies or doing some type of art or science activity. It really gets us in the mood and excited about it. Last year we watched the Disney Squanto: A Warrior's Tale for the first time. This year we watched it again, and it will probably turn into a yearly tradition.

I was looking online at some sites, tying to get some ideas of fun activities we could do together, and I ran across this site. I'm so sorry, but I forgot what the site was called, but I took a picture of one of the main pages. Alexa was sitting on my lap browsing with me, and she was absolutely glued to this site for about an hour. They had actual documents from some of the Pilgrims, had a cool section on facts and myths surrounding the Pilgrims, and a lot of info about the Wampanoag tribe.

Last year I had bought a huge bag of walnuts, wanting to do this craft/science experiment with the kids, and we never got around to it. The kids were so, so, so psyched to do this project this year.  It was all about making our own mini Mayflowers.  We cracked walnut shells in half, stuck some playdough to the bottom of the shell, and stuck in a toothpick with a bit of wax paper attached into the playdough. Then we dyed a container of water blue and tried to see which shells floated and which sunk.

I don't have pictures of this, but we also made Thanksgiving scrolls, which I'll write about more in a few days.

We also make turkey cookies by tracing our hands in paper and outlining the paper against cookie dough. It was a fun project, but it took WAY, WAY longer than I'd thought. The kids ran out of steam with it long before the cookies were done, so I did much of it by myself. But the next morning, Steve and the kids decorated the cookies with dyed icing and raisins, so they got into the spirit of it again.

We listened to some Thanksgiving songs from a kids CD and read a few picture books about the Pilgrims from the library.

What fun Thanksgiving activities have you done this year?