12 Days of Thanksgiving - Day 6

Days of Thanksgiving

I've always loved these ideas that extend through multiple days to celebrate the holiday seasons (did you catch my 13 Days of Halloween posts?). This year I found ideas for the 12 Days of Thanksgiving and I couldn't resist sharing them with you. The ideas in this post came from a very vintage magazine called Copycat Press from 1990 (which just doesn't feel like it should be labeled very vintage, but I suppose that's because I am very vintage myself!) 

The ideas are centered around using the poetry from It's Thanksgiving by Jack Prelutsky. I didn't have this book in our Club library, but I did find a few versions of read alouds online. Here's the one that includes the entire book (which is helpful since you'll use different poems each day).

Sixth Day of Thanksgiving
Read aloud the poem "The Thanksgiving Day Parade." Talk about the things everyone loves about parades. Just for fun, plan your own parade and give it a clever name. Put imagination to work creating "floats" for it. Then purchase balloons in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors and challenge members to create balloon characters. Provide paint, markers, construction paper, fabric scraps, yarn, ribbon, glue, and tape. You can make sticks for holding the balloons by tightly rolling newspaper on the diagonal and taping the ends. Name the balloon characters. Then create and distribute a flyer and posters to advertise your parade. Finally, get ready for some fun because everyone loves a parade.

Additional Activity: Rad the book Balloons Over Broadway with your group. This was one of the feature books from Summer Brain Gain 2017 (Early Elementary, Module 5). If you don't have the Summer Brain Gain materials (I couldn't find the 2017 modules online), there are some great resources available over at Reading is Fundamental and some great STEM ideas over at Get Caught Engineering.