A Turkey for Thanksgiving Read Aloud Lesson Plans for Kindergarten & First Grade

A Turkey for Thanksgiving

This is such a precious book!  I love Mr. Turkey’s expressions!

At the beginning of the week, we focus on responding to the book.

We also complete a retelling activity for A Turkey for Thanksgiving.

We’ve recently added a digital retell for this story as well.

Then we make a shift towards looking at informational texts.  We have written one for the unit, but you could also use another turkey informational text.

We work on our schema.

And then we organize what we know in a functional way.

Now that the information is organized, we get started writing our own books.

A Turkey for Thanksgiving Craft

We included a little craft activity in our Engaging Readers as well!  I love how cute these came out!

Mrs. Barton’s class turned these crafts into a Chatterpix video.  The students make the turkey talk to share one of their turkey facts!

Chatterpix is one of THE easiest apps (If I can do it… anyone can!)  No… REALLY!

You can find all of the reading response activities and craft I’ve shown above by following this link:

• Reading Comprehension:  Engaging Readers November Set Two

Turkey STEM & More!

The Science, Math, and More companion unit includes directions for this turkey STEM project and a reader’s theater, too!

This unit can be found by clicking here:

• Science, Math, and More November Set Two

More Thanksgiving Read Alouds

There are so many fun turkey books out there! Here are just a few that I have gathered in my days as a book hoarder!

• Bear Says Thanks
• Hide and Seek Turkeys
• Thanksgiving is Here
• Thanksgiving for Emily Ann
• Turkey Trouble
• A Turkey for Thanksgiving
• A Plump and Perky Turkey

You can read about our Engaging Readers book, Turkey Trouble by clicking this blog post:

•   Turkey Trouble on Deanna Jump’s Blog

Keep reading for more Thanksgiving and turkey ideas for your classroom!

Thanksgiving Activities for Kids: Poem

Each week, we have a poem that we practice for 5 days.  We do a variety of activities with this poem and the students love it!

You can read more about this shared reading activity by clicking:

•  5 Day Fluency Made Easy ~ Free Sample

You can find this poem by clicking:

• Poems and Poetry for November

If you want the video version, you can find it by clicking:

• Poems and Poetry Music/Videos for November.

Thanksgiving Themed Literacy Centers

One of the standard activities I have all year is our Predictable Sentences.  We change out the sentence stems and the vocabulary words each month.

We also have a few related books that go with this center.

You can find this activity by clicking here:

• Predictable Sentences for Thanksgiving.

The stamping center is also a year-long favorite!

Stamping Math and Literacy Center for November

Thanksgiving Themed Math Centers

These math centers are all included in one unit.

Students use these cards in a variety of ways!

We love BUMP, so any chance to add it to a center is a WIN! Students roll the dice and add.  Some students need to count all of the dots and some students are ready to step up to counting on.

This game is a making 10 activity that my class loves.  I teach this activity to the whole group before I place it in a center.

This game asks students to roll the dice and add.  Their goal is to connect 3 numbers.

Another simple addition activity.  Students will just add 1.

You can find all of the math centers listed above in my Math Centers for Kindergarten:  Thanksgiving version.

One last game I wanted to share with you is a math fluency game.  We play this game all year.  We just change the theme to keep it a “brand new game!” [psst… same game]

You can find this math fluency game by clicking here:

• Math Fluency for Thanksgiving.

Video… just because!

And if you need to get the wiggles out… this will do the trick!

Have a GREAT THANKSGIVING AND TURKEY WEEK!

Check out some other blog posts with lesson ideas for November:

• In November
• The Relatives Came 
• Turkey Trouble Activities