Spoonful of Imagination

Add it to a Family for Something Beautiful

Feast with Friends

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Last week we enjoyed doing a lot of fun Thanksgiving activities as part of our school days.  We did fun crafts, continued to talk about things we were thankful for, and even had a Thanksgiving Day feast with friends.

We have continued to do our thankful tree, and it’s been such a joy to capture their little hearts as they share what they are thankful for.

Our tree has really filled out, and Reagan loves to stare at it and rearrange the Give Thanks blocks under it.

You already saw one of our crafts we did this week, when I showed you our Thanksgiving banner, with the kids’ cute little turkeys.  I am obsessed with hand prints and wanting to capture all the cute “little-ness” of this time in paint.

We updated our Thanksgiving table runner with new turkeys.

We also did another cute turkey paint activity.  This one involved only their finger prints.

It was so fun to have my niece, Charleigh, in town to do this craft with us.  I used the kids’ fingerprints to stamp out the turkey’s feathers.  The kids were so excited to run off and play together, that I got to finish the turkeys on my own. 🙂  I glued some little wiggly eyes and painted on a beak and legs.  I then cut out the turkeys and added some fun stickers with them to a piece of paper.  I love to have framed “seasonal” art in my kitchen during each holiday.  It is almost time to make our Santa Clauses!

I think the highlight of our thanksgiving school activities was having a feast with our sweet friends that we do a co-op with.

We read a thanksgiving book, talked about things we were thankful for, learned what a “cornucopia” is, played bingo on thanksgiving images with candy corn, and made sweet little indian headdresses.

We talked about symbols and how Indians used pictures to tell stories.  Each child drew symbols on their headdress to represent themselves.  Both my boys might have drawn the transformer symbol on their headdress.

No one wanted to be a pilgrim, so we had a table full of little Indians at our feast.  It was not the perfect example of the first thanksgiving feast, as two groups of friends came together, but we had a blast!

We came up with a meal that seemed like traditional food.  A rotisserie chicken was our turkey.  They ate a lot of fish at the first thanksgiving, so we had some gold-fish.  We threw in the pumpkins as a fall food, and the carrots as a crop they would have grown.  The grapes were just an added touch because let’s face it…they are a good kid food.

I love that in the midst of having six young kids together, this feast was loud and fun (probably how MOST Thanksgiving meals are) and even entertained some “superheros” at our table.  We are so thankful for these sweet friends to do life with!

I’m pretty sure Caleb was already running around as a superhero, when I went to take the individual shots.  Life with boys on the move!  🙂

We have enjoyed fall break this week and have done NO school.  I hope you are having a wonderful week and Happy Thanksgiving!!

I linked this project up at: DIY Showoff

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving Banner

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Yesterday, I whipped up a quick Happy Thanksgiving banner.  I wanted to share it with you all, so you too could make one!  I started by printing two letters per a piece of paper.  I simply picked a font I liked and picked a size that allowed two letters to print per a page.

I cut each letter out by cutting a triangle shape around it.  I didn’t measure or worry about each triangle being the same.  I think the difference and variety adds character!

I have been holding onto our old bed skirt from when we upgraded our bed to a king and got new bedding.  It is a dark corduroy skirt, so the use of it on my Thanksgiving banner was perfect!  It adds a fun fall touch.  I simply cut out enough triangles (also not measured or exact), so that each letter had a corduroy triangle to go behind it.

I had some fun trim that I used to sew the letters to the corduroy triangles.  I love the gold contrasting on the creme paper and dark fabric.  After I sewed them all together, this banner was done!  It was so quick and cheap, and it will add a fun festive decor element to our thanksgiving celebration this next week!

I love how it came out, but I decided to add some turkeys we created this week in our homeschool.  The kids stamped their hands, cut out their hands, and painted eyes and legs to make their hands turkeys.  They then went back and glued feathers onto their hands to create a more artsy/realistic turkey.  They had a blast making them, and I thought they added a special touch to our banner.  I used clothes pins to attach the turkeys to our banner, so the banner can be recycled next year, and we can replace the turkeys with “new” turkeys.  These turkeys can retire to my kids’ scrapbooks.

I loved how it looked outside hanging in the trees, but we opted to hang our banner in our kitchen where we can enjoy it all week long.  Have you made a thanksgiving banner?  We are hosting Thanksgiving for the first time ever this year.  Would you rather host or go to someone’s house for the holidays?  I hope you are having a good weekend!