Thanksgiving History Turkey Project
Your kids won't feel that history is such a "turkey" of a subject with this fun project!
Materials Needed:
Brown kraft paper or poster board
Colored paper (card stock or construction paper) in fall colors
Markers
Craft sticks (the thin kind, like from corn dogs, rather than Popsicle-sized sticks)
Glue
To begin, you need to create a turkey body that is about two feet high. I found a picture of one I liked on the internet, printed it, drew a one inch grid on the paper, drew a two inch grid on the brown paper, then copied over the grids so that the picture was scaled up. Alternatively, you could enlarge a picture on a copier and trace it onto your brown paper. Or make it really personal and have your best artist draw it freehand for you!
Decide how many history questions you want your kids to find the answers to, then create enough feathers from the colored paper to put one question per feather. Again, you could freehand the feathers, or print them out. I found a page of feather printouts online, trimmed down some construction paper to fit the printer, and just printed directly onto my construction paper.
Glue one end of a craft stick to the end of each paper feather, but leave plenty of room to write. (If you don't have sticks, you can skip this step and just tape the feathers directly to the paper turkey later.) After the glue dries, write a question on the back of each feather you have. Leave room for them to write the answer on there as well. If you have vastly different ages of children participating, you'll want to make different levels of questions and keep them separated.
How you decide to construct your turkey is up to you. We read one book per day and each child answered one feather question each day for a while. You might want to turn them loose with the books and the feathers "scavenger hunt" style, trying to answer as many questions as possible at one time. You may decide to divide them evenly among the children and let them answer the questions as they come across the information while studying.
After the feathers were answered, we made small slits in the body of the turkey and slipped the sticks in to hold the feathers. (This way, we could pull them back out again later and look at them.) If you decide to skip the sticks, you could just tape them directly onto the body of the turkey.
The picture I'm including looks pretty plucked - alas, I lost most of ol' Tom's feathers. If you decide to try this project, I would love it if you send me a picture of your final results!
Additional Resources: Printable Turkey
