Thanks Be to God "thanksgiving turkey craft"

 I wanted to do a cute Turkey craft with my son for Thanksgiving, but I wanted to find a way we could do a little lesson at the same time... While making this Turkey, we practiced: sequencing & patterns, letter recognition, letter sounds, counting, pasting, sorting, and word spacing.

I started by cutting out a white circle (wish I had a brown paper bag on hand...tons of plastic bags, but no paper) and then drawing a turkey neck and face.  My son helped me cut out and paste the turkey's "wattle".  We laughed about the name of the appendage.  I cut out 16 colored feathers while he colored on the back of the turkey.  We also came up with a pattern for the feathers... we chose the rainbow pattern 

(Good 'ole Roy-G) 

 He loved lining them up in a line, and worked hard to make them straight.  He took great pride in his rainbow line.  While he was doing this I prompted him to find the next feather in our sequence by repeating the pattern aloud.  He does a great job with this. 

Then I wrote our Thanksgiving message "Thanks Be to God" and he said "oh no, mommy, this one is missing its letter!"  (see him pointing to the red feather below, so glad I caught that cute moment)  He was quite concerned.  I showed him that if we removed the blank feathers, the whole meaning would change ( it would be thanksbetoGod- which I said really fast) :)

Once we talked about our message, I decided to hide the feathers around our den for him to find.  We worked on counting during this time rather than letters, and he counted to 16 as he found each.

(yep...that's a wadded up sock there on the couch, please excuse it... )

anyway,  when we got back to the table, I wrote the phrase out again on another piece of paper for him to use as a pattern.  He rearranged the feathers to again give our message and then placed them under the turkey's body.

 Once each feather was in place, we lifted the turkey's body, put some glue around the top edges and flipped it back over the feathers and pressed down to set the glue.

Our little guy is proudly displayed in our kitchen, and we are Praising and Giving Thanks to God, indeed this Thanksgiving!

Thank YOU also, my sweet readers, for following my blog :) 

A Blessed Thanksgiving to you and yours!