Crafts for Thanksgiving - Chapter 1.

I'm not sure if E. understands the concept of being thankful, though one night when we talked to the Angels I wanted to say good night and she said:

- Wait, Mommy!
- Yes?
- I want to say thank you.
- What for?
- For the skeleton costume.

So I might be wrong. She can also say thank you whenever I give her some food or a toy. Sometimes she reminds Daddy to say thank you.

I told her the Thanksgiving story very basically though we focused more on being creative this time.

Colour your turkey - letter recognition

I mentioned to E. that American people celebrate Thanksgiving with turkeys, like we celebrate Martin-day with geese.

So we coloured a turkey. I printed an image of a turkey from the net, but before we started I added some letters to different parts of the turkey. With some of the dot markers I signed orange, yellow, red and purple next to the turkey. She immediately understood how to colour it. We have no brown dot markers so we used a crayon.

identifying the letters

staring with yellow

our colourful turkey

Bubble wrap paint turkey

I found this idea on craftymorning.com . I'm not going into details as you find easy-to-follow instructions on the site.

It looked great, so we tried it. It's a little too complicated with a 2 and a half year old. You need to wait a lot for the paint to dry. E. had no patience. But she enjoyed the painting. I had no dark brown coloured paper so we painted the body too. (The thermo-hat is due to an ear infection)

painting the body

adding the eyes on the stool - where else?

finished with the beak too, though there's no snood

I cut the feathers - she did the sticking

Turkey without legs and snood

Autumn tree variations

The first tree idea came when E. enjoyed looking at me punching leaf shapes with this.

So while she was asleep in the afternoon I punched some more leaves (yellow, red, orange, brown and creamy colours) and I put them together with some real dry leaves next to a drawn tree. With the help of some glue we put the leaves onto the tree's branches. She wasn't interested in the real ones.

Broken leaves had to go on the ground, under the tree

Our nanny arrived and they went on together

Have you noticed that some leaves are falling down ;) ?

"Nice tree. Can I pee on it?"

The second tree is based on the same idea as the dot marker turkey. I drew a tree and on the branches I wrote the first letters of some colours. Dotting fun.

I'm planning to do some more Thanksgiving activities. So come back for the autumn tree of gratitude.