Thanksgiving Classroom Party

One of the ideas that has spoken to our family for years is the idea of taking back our lives, our health, our children and our education.

One of our goals in homeschooling our children is just that - living and teaching the way we see fit for our family. We, with our whole heart, believe that homeschool is not the right fit for everyone. School is a beautiful place with so many wonderful resources. There are fabulous teachers out there that love our children like their own.

In our family we love learning no matter how you are doing it ... because of our love for feeding our brains we have decided to share our homeschooling successes with other mothers, teachers and homeschoolers.

We have successes and failures everyday ...  here was a successful day ... A Thanksgiving party with some fun Thanksgiving games that you can save for your party next year.

Gobble .... Gobble

First we made some fabulous Thanksgiving hats http://nontoygifts.com/thanksgiving-hats-for-kids/

to get us into the party mood!

After we made our party hats and ate popcorn we decided to talk about the things we were thankful for and play the ABC's of thankfulness http://writtenreality.com/thankful-abcs-printable/.
In this activity we wrote down everything we were thankful for A-Z! Super fun exercise to get us talking about all the wonderful blessings in our lives!

We also reviewed the things we knew about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower.

The next activity was a STEM activity http://plansforabettertomorrow.blogspot.com/2015/11/thanksgiving-stem-olympics.html where we built boats (the Mayflower) and saw who's boat could hold the most passengers. We each got tin foil and straws to build our boats as well as 100 passengers (the number of passengers on the actual Mayflower) to fill our boats. As we filled our boats with passengers we talked about who's would float .. who's would hold the most passengers (of course we both thought our own would be the winner!) .. we talked about why one design would work over the other. The conclusion is that a boat with more flat surface area is going to be the boat that can hold the most passengers without sinking.

As we reviewed fun turkey facts we raced to see who could blow the turkey feather across the finish line first.  We tried the feather with a turkey baster (we thought that would be more fun) but the turkey baster didn't get enough air to blow the feather. The turkey baster did blow a small puff ball though so we raced that with the turkey baster. We ended up blowing the turkey feather with a straw. This activity was a popular one as we played it over and over and was a hit with the little one as well!!

After the turkey race we decided to calm it down a little before lunch and play Thanksgiving Pictionary and Thanksgiving Scategories.

After lunch we wrapped up our party with some hot chocolate, cookies, a little Stuff the Turkey game

http://kidfriendlythingstodo.com/2015/11/stuff-the-turkey-thanksgiving-game-for-kids/?utm_content=buffer73bf6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=pinterest.com&utm_campaign=buffer#_a5y_p=4658673 and Pin the Gobbler on the Turkey . I think we played these two games for over an hour and a half.

We feel so blessed always but this time of year really brings to light all the wonderful blessings and freedoms we have in our lives. We are so grateful to have the opportunity to homeschool and to write and blog and do all of these wonderful things. We hope that this time of year you can reflect with your little people all the great and wonderful things you have in your life as well!