"Hand"-some Turkeys for Thanksgiving

We unpacked our paints that have been packed up for 3 months so that we could paint hand turkeys. We didn’t have any brown, so we had to mix colors to make our own brown. We mixed blue and orange, and that made a nice brown for Kelsey. Anna used those same colors, but she was not happy with the color she got, as you can tell by the look on her face!

Anna painted Emma’s palm and thumb brown and then each finger a pretty, bright color that she chose.

Here’s Anna still trying to make a brown that she could stand. She added a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but I don’t think she was ever really satisfied with her brown.

Garrett was fascinated with the paint mixing.

I didn’t get any pictures of printing with their painted hands, because, as you can imagine with a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old, I was hopping to try to keep painted fingers off of things they shouldn’t touch. Abby’s dress suffered lots of damage. I finally had to take it off of her. She kept wiping her hands on it!

After they finished their turkeys, I let them use the rest of the paint to draw whatever they wanted. They love doing that!

I read them a Thanksgiving story while they painted. It was called Mary’s First Thanksgiving by Kathy-Jo Wargin, illustrated by Robert Papp. The subtitle is “An Inspirational Story of Gratefulness”. It tells about a young immigrant girl from Ireland. She is sad because the other children at school talk about the big Thanksgiving meals that their families are planning. Her family will only have their regular food plus maybe an extra loaf of bread with some honey and a few sausages.

Her parents discover that she is feeling that way and they tell her about the difficult years that the Pilgrims endured and how they had to survive on clams, fish and ground nuts, and a few grains of corn during several winters.

After things got better, they still put five grains of corn on their plates at each year’s celebration to remind them of their hardships and five blessings. To find out what those blessings were and to discover what Mary’s family’s blessings were, you should check out this book.

Fiona poses next to her pictures of a turkey and a mouse. We used to have a mouse in our garage.