The Week of Thanksgiving

This week we were focusing on Thanksgiving and gratitude. I read Grant a book about the Pilgrim's and their journey to America, their hardships, how they met the Indians, and their triumphs before bed on Sunday night and he said he knew all that stuff from watching the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving cartoon, including the name of the ship, the names of the first Indians the pilgrim's met, and that there was a baby born on the Mayflower.

On Monday, I took some pictures of the kids outside before our walk.

This is a picture of Julia thinking about "running" (she can get going pretty fast) away from me:

This is a picture of Julia running away from me:

Unfortunately, I was not fast enough to catch her before she went into the dog kennel (I was right behind her, really) and stepped right into a pile of dog poo. I picked her up, and at this point still didn't know what had happened until I put her down outside of the kennel and Johanna says, "It smells like dog poop." I didn't think much of this, because, hey, we have dogs and they poop. Then I smelled it, looked down and realized poop had rubbed off Julia's shoe onto my pants, and onto hers, too. Eew, yucky! I went and got a wet towel, wiped us down (they were small spots and we did change our pants a little later) and we continued with our walk. Johanna even did some posing for me, and then joined Grant with throwing rocks in the pond.

I read the kids a story called The Littlest Pilgrim. After that we talked about what food the Pilgrims would have eaten as we drew pictures of cornucopia's.

pumpkins, pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, bread, fish, turkey, apples, berries, nuts, (Grant says broccoli) = YES.

pizza, ice cream, fish sticks (Grant hesitated on this one because he knew they had fish), anything from a can = NO.

When we were done with our drawings we played a couple rounds of Pin the Hat on the Turkey.


Mom's drawing:

Grant's drawing:




On Tuesday I read them a book called Thanksgiving is a Time to be Thankful. We talked about what we were thankful for, and how an attitude of gratitude will attract more blessings into our lives. I asked them what they wanted more of in their lives.

Grant - Lego's and blankies.
Johanna - Angels.

They made leaf drawings and then we used beeswax to make pumpkins and apples for our mini cornucopia.





On Wednesday, Johanna saw Julia wearing her pink and brown striped shirt, and said "I want to wear my pink and brown shirt." But it didn't stop with the shirt. I started to put some grey pants on Johanna and she said, "No. I want my brown ones like Julia." We had to dig those out of the hamper. I decided that dirty pants were better then a meltdown.

In school, I decided to focus more on the Native Americans. I read them a Cherokee legend about how corn came to be. I sang a song about Indian Children as the kids began drawing "hand turkeys" (Julia got in on this project), and Grant and Johanna used corn kernels to make necklaces. We also set up the tee-pee in the driveway. They had fun playing in that.

Johanna's turkey is getting rained on (more like he was caught in a torrential down-pour):