Prepping for Thanksgiving FUN

Happy Monday!!  I hope you had a wonderful weekend.  We had a great time with friends, family and loved the cool weather that rolled into town.  I did a grocery store run and got some Christmas shopping done.  Our most exciting news of the weekend was that Fletcher decided to start CRAWLING!  Hello baby proofing every single room. 
I'm excited to spend the week focusing on Thanksgiving and all the things we're thankful for this year.  My husband gets his Fall/Thanksgiving break which means he has the week off.  I'm looking forward to getting to see him more even though I'm sure he'll still go into work some because he's been SUPER busy this semester.  

 

I thought I'd show you some things we're working on this week to prepare for Thanksgiving.  You can bet we'll be enjoying one last hurrah for Fall donuts, eating chili and enjoying time with our family.

1. Color Your Own Tablecloth
I picked up this fun table cloth at Wal-Mart this weekend. It's under $2 and it's really cute.  There are turkeys to color, mazes, word searches and I think kids of all ages would have fun decorating this table cloth at Thanksgiving dinner. 

2. Fun with Candy Corn

I found these FREE Candy Corn Preschool Printables from This Reading Mama last year and we have loved them ever since.  They are so easy for little hands to do and we had a great time working on them.  We named letters, counted, practiced patterns and fine motor skills.  

We made a rule that Olive could snack on the broken candy corns and then save the whole ones for the candy corn activity.  She did great with this and didn't eat her whole bowl of candy.  Baby brother was happy eating a spatula and puffs :)

3. Play-Doh Mats

I found these FREE Fall Number Mats on 123Homeschool4Me and they were so much fun!

We printed them out in color and then slid them in plastic sleeves.  You could also laminate them, but it was easier for us to do it this way.  My three year old loved them.  I did two sheets in one sleeve so she just flipped them over when she was done.

We stuck with one color of play-doh and she did great!  We counted apples for the tree, traced the numbers with our fingers and then practiced her fine motor skills by rolling out long pieces to make the shape of the number.  We have played with these mats for the past few weeks!

 

4. DIY Thanksgiving Place Cards

We are still brainstorming ideas for our turkey place cards this year.  I'm not sure if we'll go the hand print turkey route this year, but you can bet they'll include some cute kid art!  We are thinking about using cupcake liners for our cards so we need to get busy and start making them.  You can see all of our ideas from the past few years here

We have also been enjoying reading through our new Bible Stories book called:

BedTime Read and Rhyme Bible Stories by Bonnie Rickner Jensen.

I have been looking for a devotional to read with our young kids that would hold their attention, have good illustrations to go with the stories, and included Bible verses.  I love that this devotional has stories that rhyme.  My kids both really enjoy it and each story gives us lots to talk about.  The book has a built in bookmark so it is really to keep track of where we are reading.  The book is really beautiful and each story is spread out over several pages.  The illustrations are pretty and I appreciate the Bedtime Prayer with each story.  It's a sentence that give you a good starting point for your bedtime prayer that also ties into the Bible story you just read.  I'd definitely recommend this devotional to families with little kids.  The stories are short enough to hold their attention while still be detailed.  This book would be a great stocking stuffer for Christmas!

*We were gifted this book by BookLook Bloggers in exchange for an honest review of it.

What fun Thanksgiving things are you working on this week??