This Family is a Bunch of Turkeys! [printable book]

Yep, you guessed it. That's me as a turkey. HA!

We’re a goofy family all right. My boys love to be tickled and my husband and I still love to act silly (despite our ages). So what could be more perfect than turning each of our family members into a turkey?

That’s precisely what my son did.

When he came home from school, we read 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving, a clever book about saving some lovable turkeys from their fate as Thanksgiving dinner. After a few laughs, we got down to business.

I gave my son pictures of each member of the family and some coloring pages I’d whipped up. He read the text on the cover page, “This family is a bunch of turkeys,” and immediately chuckled. (This was gonna be fun.)

Download a PDF of the book pages here, cut vertically, and get ready for a whole heap of silliness!

Next he filled in the blanks on each page, telling why each of us is a turkey and why he’s thankful for us. Then he colored each turkey, cut heads out of each of the photos, and glued them on the turkeys.

It was up to him whether to add googly eyes, glasses, horns, etc. to the photos. At first my son was satisfied with the turkeys as is, but the next day, we all had glasses and earrings. (What will I look like tomorrow, I wonder?)

When all the pages were complete (starting with the cover and ending with my son’s turkey), I added a small folded scrap of construction paper over the pile of pages at the top and stapled it for a spine. Voilá!

This was super fun! (Silly activities always are.)

A blog post from And That’s Family was my inspiration. Stop by for a visit and have a laugh. I did!

Oceans, Continents, and Directions, Oh My!

When I purchased a subscription to National Geographic Kids magazine for my son, they sent us an inflatable globe. He has been fascinated with it ever since it was filled with my husband’s hot air.

All on his own he began asking me to name a country for him to find. Of course, I didn’t hesitate to honor his request, even writing some of their names down so he could find them easier. When he had trouble, I found myself saying things like, “Look in North America,” “It’s a country in Asia,” or “First find Africa.” Each time, all I got was a blank stare. My son didn’t know the seven continents!

This activity is meant to fix that.

To start, we read a great book that shared information about the terrain, location, peoples, and animals on the Earth’s seven different continents.

Afterwards, I gave my son a printed map of the earth with no labels. I had written the following on the bottom:

North America – green

South America – brown

Europe – purple

Africa - yellow

Asia – red

Australia/Oceania – orange

Antarctica – blue

I asked my son to identify the continents from memory and color each according to this key. He remembered North America, South America, and Antarctica but needed to review Bobbie Kalman’s book again for a refresher to label the others. (And all the little islands off the coast of the continents, which continent do those belong to? We definitely needed the book’s map to answer those questions!)

When my son had color-coded all seven continents, I added their names and had him draw a compass rose on his map. Then I gave him directional clues to help him label the oceans. I said things like “The Pacific Ocean is west of North America” and “The Indian Ocean is south of Asia.” (I helped him with the spelling until all five oceans were added.)

I could tell he was proud of himself. At bedtime, I told him he had five more minutes to look at books before it was ‘lights out.’ He asked to look at his new map instead!

Our continents activity was inspired by a blog post over at 2 Love Learning (if you haven’t stopped there, do!).

Kente Cloth-inspired Pattern Practice

AB, AAB, ABC, ABB … if you’ve ever worked with a child on patterns you, no doubt, recognize these. Frankly, I think some of the traditional pattern-practice activities are a bore [yawn]. I wanted a fun way to keep my son engaged as we worked on creating and recognizing patterns. When I stumbled across a picture of Kente cloth (fabric woven by the peoples of Ghana, Africa), a light bulb went off.

To start our activity, I Googled Kente cloth and clicked on “images.” I showed my son all of the different pictures and told him we were going to replicate the look of Kente cloth with an art project. He was game.

Earlier in the week, I had my husband cut two rectangular blocks of wood the same size from a 2x4. (If you replicate this activity, don’t feel like you need to use wood. Anything that is hard, shaped like a rectangle, and could get paint on it would work.) I cut lots of cardstock rectangles from five colors of cardstock in the same shape as our blocks of wood.

Then, I had my son wrap the two blocks of wood in yarn. I tied the two ends together on the back of the blocks, he applied acrylic paint with a sponge brush, and stamped the yarn prints on two different colors of cardstock. My son was blown away at how cool these homemade stamps were. (Okay, who am I kidding? I was too!) I got the idea here.

When he had stamped eight blocks of each, we moved on and began making our patterned blocks in the following configurations:

AB

AAB

ABC

ABB

Each strip of our Kente cloth would have blocks with one of these patterns. I cut the cardstock rectangles into horizontal or vertical strips and my son glued them on. When he’d created two or three blocks with the pattern we were making, we glued our blocks onto a big piece of paper in an AB pattern, alternating with the stamped blocks.

This took a long time and a lot of thinking. My son, who isn’t normally the patient type, stuck with it until all four strips were done and glued onto our plain paper. He was captivated by how the patterns all came together!

When it was done, I had him explain the meaning, symbolism, or significance of his Kente cloth design by completing a custom-made handwriting sheet I created. I had to smile at his explanation: the cloth he made commemorates losing his second tooth!

Download a PDF of this handwriting paper here.

Write Like An Egyptian

When my son and I got to the sixth chapter of Mary Pope Osborne’s book Mummies in the Morning, a light bulb went off in my head.

The third book in the Magic Tree House series takes Jack and Annie back to ancient Egypt where a ghost-queen asks for their help translating some hieroglyphs.

With a big plastic tub of card-making stamps collecting dust in our basement, I seized an opportunity to put them to use. First I picked 26 small stamps, one for each letter of the alphabet and stamped a key.

Then I stamped a “hieroglyphic” message for my son. Just like in Pope’s book when the code led the two young children to the Book of the Dead, the message my son decoded would reveal a hidden treasure under his bed (an inexpensive toy concealed in a brown lunch sack). I also made a blank sheet so he could stamp his own “hieroglyphs” for his Dad to decode.

Before my son started to read and write like an Egyptian, though, we read the First Facts book Hieroglyphs by Kremena Spengler.

Making a Miniature Totem Pole

My favorite of all the Native American art is made by tribes in the Pacific Northwest. The transforming masks, button blankets, and totem poles are absolutely incredible! This activity is an effort to give my son his own appreciation for these peoples and their incredible crafts and legends.

Before my son began creating his own miniature totem pole, we read much of the “Carving the Pole” chapter from Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith’s book Totem Pole. This excerpt explained that totem poles are like signs that help pass on legends and stories from generation to generation.

The book is written in first person, from the perspective of a young boy in the Tsimshian tribe, whose father is a wood carver. David explains to readers how his father first makes a drawing, then transfers the drawing to the cedar log before he begins carving.

We looked at the drawing in Hoyt-Goldsmith’s book of the pole David's father planned and then read the meaning of the figures being carved.

Next I gave my son sets of totem pole figures printed from ScissorCraft.com onto brown craft paper (I cut postal mailing paper into 8 ½- by 11-inch rectangles and fed it through our printer to replicate the look of wood). My son selected six drawings, added color to some of the details and then we cut them out.

Now I asked him to look again at the picture in the book of the carver’s drawing and told him to move his cut figures around so they would stack vertically well. Next I cut several ½-inch vertical slits in the bottom of a paper towel tube and placed this end of the tube inside another tube, so they would look like one long pole. Next, he applied glue to the back of each figure and placed it on the pole until it was complete.

We looked at pictures of the pole raising in the totem pole book and raised our own pole. To secure in its upright position, I applied a bead of hot glue to the bottom of the pole and set it on a small piece of corrugated cardboard.

Download a PDF of this handwriting paper here.

Lastly, I gave my son a piece of custom-made handwriting paper and asked him to tell me the story of his pole. His story seemed to take inspiration from “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” It began, “The eagle went to catch the frog. The frog went to catch the fly …” Very clever, huh?

Not only is his pole pretty cool, but he learned about another culture’s art and got a little creative writing practice in at the same time! Fun!