Are you looking for fun Thanksgiving center freebies for your preschool children? Then, you will love our Turkey themed activities and freebies!
After we read the book a few times, I gave Violet a “Turkey Color” sheet and she searched the house for all of the different colored turkeys. When she would find one, she would color it to match. She is obsessed with coloring so I knew this would be a hit. I placed all of the colors that she would need in a snack size baggie and attached them to the top of the clipboard. When I use this in a classroom (if your lucky enough to have an assistant or parent helper) I would have half of the students do this activity and the other half work on a turkey crafting activity.
To review the colors we completed this cute little color book. Prior to the activity, I underlined each color word with the matching color. As we came to each page we named the color.
Another one of my favorite turkey books is Five Silly Turkeys by Salina Yoon. It is such a simple, yet cute rhyming/number book. I based a whole days worth of activities around it. After we read the story, we talked about how the turkeys went missing in the story. I asked her if she could help find them around the house. I gave her a magnifying class and asked her to search the house like she was a little turkey looking for her friends-and boy did she get into it!
One of my favorite fine motor activities is to have children dehusk the corn. This little girl got her fingers working and helped push each corn kernal into a little sensory container. Then I added little fall felt stickers to the corn. Violet used her “turkey claw” (with a few more toes) to search the corn for the items. Then she placed them on a laminated mat. We practiced one to one correspondence with the item and identifying the numbers 1-5.
When it started to rain, we played this cute little gross motor activity that even the seven year-old wanted to participate in. I placed three hoola hoops (from the dollar tree) in a line with the “turkey number printables” inside them, with the number 3 the furthest away. I wrapped beanbags with rainbow scarves and we talked about the colors as we threw them. Unfortunately for the poor little turkey, he was the most fun to throw:)
Next we read my favorite Thanksgiving/turkey book, Run Turkey Run by Diane Mayr. We had fun helping the turkeys race to the woods. We used a straw to blow the feathers across the table to the safety of the trees (blocks).
The boys and girls loved our tag game we named after the story. One of the kids pretended to be the farmer and wore an orange hat. The others were the turkeys (felt crown). The farmer had to catch all the turkeys and bring them back to the farm.
We read the story, T is for Turkey by Tanya Lee Stone. Then, we listed all of the things that start with a /t/ sound on a giant piece of paper.
We had fun finger painting a giant letter T. If you were to use this in a classroom, it would be fun to write the first letter of each child’s name and have them finger paint or glue feathers on it and share with their peers.
A few extras…
Of course we had to make something sweet, so we made these cute cupcake turkeys. You can find these little kits on Amazon or Michael’s. The beak is built into the cupcake liner but a piece of candy corn and twistable licorice (for the waddle) would be cute as well.