Monday, November 16, 2009

Thanksgiving Holiday Helper


Living Books Curriculum, a great Charlotte Mason resource, has free "Holiday Helper" packets for several holidays throughout the year. I like them because they include beautiful poems, stories and art for a picture study. Beautiful and enticing first-person accounts for a young child. By all means, go ahead and make a hand print turkey, but try reading a beautiful Thanksgiving poem, too! You can download the Thanksgiving Helper at CurrClick for free.

9 comments:

Mary Alice said...

Wow, I can't believe I have never come across this website before -- this is just the sort of realistic, practical support that my living books lifestyle needs. These will be a great compliment to our Thanksgiving book basket and morning meeting! Thanks for the links!

Mary Alice said...

PS We love our handprint turkeys, a holiday tradition here at the lost trail school!

texas mommy said...

We do too, MA! Handprint and pinecone turkeys are on the agenda this week. We also made this pear/fruit turkey last week, which the boys thought was so cool! http://familyfun.go.com/thanksgiving/thanksgiving-dinner-recipes/thanksgiving-appetizers/gobble-me-up-783884/

Anonymous said...

Great site, thanks Tex! When you print off these books, do you laminate them and keep them for the next year or just discard after one use?
-Renee

Right Said Red said...

This is great Tex! I didn't know about CurrClick--what a great resource. I just used this site and was able to put together a little Thanksgiving curriculum for my oldest two children.

I also did a search and found this site,
www.apples4theteacher.com
which had a story of the first Thanksgiving that was great for my little ones. They also had a lot of free resources.

And I searched the internet for images for my children to color. I found some great ones here:
http://coloringpages.net/thanksgiving.html

They have images for other holidays as well. My children love to color, so in general getting to color in images is a great way to reinforce our books and stories.

texas mommy said...

If you sign up for CurrClick's weekly newsletter, they always have one free download a week!

Jennifer Frey said...

I really appreciate helpful posts like this. I wonder if you ladies would also please share how you plan to celebrate Advent with your families. It is right around the corner, and I would appreciate any fresh ideas, especially for preschoolers. Of course, we'll do an Advent wreath, but I would really love other craft oriented ideas and ways to celebrate that are liturgically grounded.

Right Said Red said...

Jennifer,

ONe of us will definitely do an Advent post, hopefully sooner rather than later ;-) Be sure to check the comments of any such post as the other builders will chime in with links and their plans.

Thanks for the encouragement! It is always nice to hear that our posts are helpful.

Blessings,
Red

texas mommy said...

Renee, I print them on regular paper and put them in binders (from Costco) according to season (I have one for just Thanksgiving). Then, I copy onto cardstock, make additional copies as needed for resuable stuff so I will never have to go find where the resources are again (which is unlikely to happen!)

Jennifer, if you want to get some ideas, I'd look through the archives at: http://showerofroses.blogspot.com/ and http://dawnathome.typepad.com/by_sun_and_candlelight/