Baked Cotton Balls and Thanksgiving games and activities

Twice a month, I teach the 4 and 5 year olds at Blue Rock's co-op. There are 18 kids and I'm constantly looking for fun ways to teach them. Yesterday I decided to have a Thanksgiving theme. We fed a turkey while practicing our reading, practiced manners, and thought of ways to be thankful. I made some baked cotton balls to feed the turkey. Here's how to make baked cotton balls.

Baked Cotton Balls

1 cup flour

1 cup water

food coloring

Line a cookie sheet with foil and preheat the oven to 300 degrees. In a bowl, mix the flour and water. Adjust water and flour as needed to make a smooth paste. Then separate into bowls and add food coloring to each dish and mix until desired color. We made 3 colors, Blue Rock wanted to make orange, blue, and purple. Dip each cotton ball one at a time in the mixture. Place cotton balls on the cookie sheet. Bake at 300 degrees for 40 minutes. Once cooled, you can write on them with a sharpie if you want. I wrote thanksgiving foods and let the kids read the foods if they could read, if not they could name a food they liked or I'd read the word for them. Then they got to feed the turkey. 

Blue Rock loved helping me make these and enjoyed feeding the turkey. Princess even had fun feeding the turkey. The kids liked it at the co-op as well. To make the turkey, I took an empty gallon milk jug and cut the top off, added felt for the face, and taped paper for details. I taped everything to it. I was thankful that it lasted through the co-op.

For the manners game, I printed off these pictures and taped them to plates. I would start and ask the child next to me if he/she would like some of what was pictured on the plate. They would say "yes, please," or "no thank you." Then they would ask the person next to them and so on. I have to find the link to where I found the pictures. 

I also had a thankful bag. Inside was some different items. We'd pull one item out at a time and ask the kids why we would be thankful for the item. I had a Bible, flower with a ladybug on it, empty water bottle, pumpkin, and socks. After we went through these items they got to draw a picture of things they were thankful for.