Turkey Pinecone Craft and Thanksgiving Books

Happy Thanksgiving!
I am so grateful for books and crafts in my family's life. This little pinecone turkey is one of our favorite Thanksgiving crafts we use as a table decoration.


To make these you’ll need:

• Pinecones (we grabbed ours from our backyard)
• Craft feathers
• Yellow, 1 inch pom poms (for the head)
• Google Eyes (2)
• Red construction paper (cut little squiggle to attach to beak)
• Orange Pipe Cleaner, we used about 1 inch for the beak then folded in half
• Orange foam mat ( really makes 1 huge foot for stability but cut it to look like 2)

I used a hot glue gun to make it last longer. The kids can set  the feathers in place without touching the glue area. The same with the pop pom head and placing the pinecone onto the foam feet. You can always let the kids use craft glue and let them try to put it together themselves – depending on their age.



We made these a few years ago and they’ve held up nicely. You can stick little name cards in the pinecones for a place marker at the Thanksgiving table.

Here are a few of our favorite Thanksgiving picture books:
I love the colorful graphics and the easy to understand text in Thanksgiving Day by Gail Gibbons.
 
Thanksgiving Is for Giving Thanks, by Margaret Sutherland, reminds kids about the simple things they can be grateful for.


And this was the first year we read 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving, by Dav Pilkey.
I’ll admit I don’t think I was ready to introduce vegetarianism to my kids the night before Thanksgiving. My daughter said “Oh, that’s the turkey we eat at Thanksgiving?” Great, now I’m going to have her picturing a live turkey on the table gobbling (groveling) for its life. A little like the Simpson episode where Lisa Simpson pictures the lamb on the table bleating “Don’t eat me.”  Nothing against vegetarians. My sister-in-law pulls out her tofurkey every year. Everyone can eat what they want but I just didn’t want to introduce that concept to my kids at this stage.
 
Anyway the book was still cute and had fun illustrations and a silly rhyme to tell the story of saving turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy some turkey! And some books!
I'd love to know what you are thankful for this year. Leave a comment below.