A Crafty Thanksgiving Continued

Crafty Thanksgiving Day 2:

We made pictures of the Mayflower crossing the ocean - the kids' handprints were the ship and we glued on sails, painted the ocean and sky, and added cotton ball clouds and glittery suns.



Crafty Thanksgiving Day 3:
We made dough and formed it into Plymouth Rock cookies, imprinting 1620 on them to signify the year the Pilgrims landed. We read Psalm 100 aloud together, just like the pilgrims did when they saw land.

BB's rocks were a little flat




Forming our Plymouth rocks


Ready for the oven

While the Plymouth Rock cookies were baking and then cooling, we made Native American headdresses and talked about Squanto, who cousin B was learning about it school, who interpreted between the pilgrims and other Native Americans. I tried to really emphasize how the Native Americans helped the pilgrims in their unexpected circumstances and that helping people in need and being thankful for help received is part of what we celebrate at Thanksgiving. While I do think that Thanksgiving's origins are surrounded by complex issues in our nation's history ("Hey, I discovered your front porch, and it's mine now!", as J says), I think the "helping people in need" and "gratefulness" lessons are good ones we can pull out for the toddler-preschool-elementary set.


My new favorite picture, modeling our headresses (I'm wearing SS's)




Crafty Thanksgiving Day #4:

We put the glaze on our Plymouth Rock cookies. We had fun making the glaze gray using red, blue, and green food coloring.





One of the finished products

Of course, then we had to eat some of the cookies. Once the kids finished their cookies (I tasted them, they were kind of okay, kind of grossly sweet with the glaze), then we talked about how the Native Americans taught the pilgrims to farm the new land and also to fish in order to get food, and we made fish using toilet paper rolls for the body, buttons for scales, and tissue paper for tails. BB decided to do his crafts in his duck costume wearing his Auntie's sunglasses - with his headdress on, it was a pretty entertaining look.





Once we were done with our fish, I of course forced the kids to line up for a photo shoot with their Mayflower paintings, headdresses, and fish.

Smiles from SS!!
SS is holding BB's fish, so you can get a better idea of what the fish looked like.

We have one more craft to go, which we are going to do on Thanksgiving day, and if you think of what obvious Thanksgiving-y thing you haven't seen yet, you can probably guess what the craft is making...gobble gobble.

Happy almost-Thanksgiving! I'm getting ready to make my grandma's cranberry salad, Memaw's (candied) yams (it's my friend's Memaw, I just got the recipe from her), and corn pudding - those are my Thanksgiving-dinner contributions. What are you guys making?