Turkey Snack Holders

Found this cute little turkey snack holder idea from Lisa Storms on Pinterest.  Just a cute picture with no real instructions, but I figured how hard can it be!

I started with 2 halves of a styrofoam ball which I painted brown.  Remember not to use spray paint since it dissolves styrofoam! It did take almost an entire bottle of acrylic paint though!

Once dry I made them little paper heads with googly eyes.  I basically made the heads the same as the turkeys for the turkey hunt since I did them at the same time.

Now the feathers of this turkey were little cones made of scrapbook paper.  I just hot glued the edges to hold the cones together.

The tricky part was trying to figure out how to put them in the ball.  I tried toothpicks, but they were too wobbly.  So I made holes in the ball with a pencil.  I stuck the pencil in and swirled it around to make the holes large enough for the tips of the cones to stick in.

I tried to add the cones as I did it to make sure the weight distribution was even  otherwise my turkeys weren't going to sit flat!

After all the cones are in and your turkey is where you want him you can fill with snacks!  I used a mixture of bugles (tiny cornucopias), candy corn, and peanuts (not sure why, but the girls wanted peanuts).

It was certainly nice to have something not as sweet for them to snack on on Thanksgiving day, and it was fairly clean and portable!

Turkey Hunt

I saw the idea for a turkey hunt on Frugal Fun for Boys, and while my boy isn't big enough to shoot a Nerf gun, my girls are, and they love them! Instead of pop up turkeys I went for standing turkeys that would fall down when hit.  I thought the extra drama would excite the girls even if it did mean picking up turkeys between each round.

I started with a Gerber Puffs container and scrapbook paper.  (I have saved these containers for so long; I was happy to finally find a use for some!)

I cut out a turkey body that would fit the Puffs containers and a whole bunch of colored feathers.  I used hot glue to glue it all together and add paper noses, wattles, and googly eyes.

 After I had all my turkeys made; I hot glued them to the containers.  Ta-da! Cute little turkeys to shoot.  Although Eli tried to call them ducks; they do look like turkeys, right???

At our first Thanksgiving we tried it outside.  The wind made it a little hard because the turkeys wanted to blow over.  Once we found a less windy spot the girls had fun shooting them over and over.  Eli preferred to steal them and hug them.

My kids didn't want to shoot as much at the next Thanksgiving (Yes we had two), but my nieces sure did! O wasn't strong enough to cock the Nerf gun, so she ran over them with the lawn mower instead.

 My kids preferred sliding up and down the hall this time.

We didn't play with any real rules, but I am sure you could see who could hit the most or the furthest or even play a game a HORSE like you would in basketball taking turns at different locations.  Ours were just excited to knock them over!

Footprint Turkeys

Instead of our traditional hand print turkeys this year, we decided to try footprint turkeys!  I had a silly idea that we would paint the kids feet to make the bodies.  Well we did it, but doing Eli's was a chore.  He giggled and grabbed at his foot the entire time you tried to paint it.  We had paint on both feet and both hands as well as my hands and arms! The girls were much more cooperative, although they did giggle.

After the paint dried we glued feathers around the turkey to make the tail. We used the toe part of our footprint as the bottom and the heel as the head.

This is when Skippyjon Jones decided to get involved! He loved the feathers on the kitchen floor, and the girls played with him with the feathers too.  Unfortunately he also ran off with a few feathers that had just been glued down!

 

After the feathers were on we added googly eyes and little paper triangles for beaks.

As we were finishing up I was definitely second guessing my thoughts on using the kitchen floor rather then the table.  I thought we could spread out and work easier. Spread out we did, a little too much!

We ended up with some cute turkeys though!

Hope everyone has a fabulous Thanksgiving!

Feed the Turkey Sight Words

Stepping away from our usual this week because of Thanksgiving! I have found several Turkey printables for the girls to work on, and I also made up a little game for them to practice sight words.

Cute Turkey Printables:

Color-by-Number Turkey 

Color the Turkey Feathers Book 

Turkey Hundreds Chart

For the game I started with a clean milk jug which I painted brown with acrylic paint. Then I cut a hole for the mouth and then cut the top off.

Then, using construction paper, I added a wattle, beak, and feathers.  I stuck on some googly eyes too.

Cut a slit in the base of the triangle, so it can bend around the mouth.

Now for something to feed the turkey.  I considered paper, but thought it would be too hard to get back out of the turkey. Instead I used the baked cotton balls I had used for the Squishing Sight Words game.  The only differences were I cut the cotton balls in half to make them smaller, and I used yellow to make them look like corn.

Then I wrote sight words on them (I included colors and numbers this time) with a sharpie.

Now to play.  I left all the sight word "corn" in a bowl and had the girls pull one out randomly and read the word.  If they read it they got to feed it to the turkey.  The first time through I had to help since there were a few new words there.

Eli couldn't resist playing too.  He wanted to feed the "corn" to the turkey and to himself!

 Once they were all in the turkey we just dumped them out the bigger hole at the top of the turkey.

They could also play against each other by giving them their own bowl to go through.  They would take turns, and whoever emptied their bowl first would be the winner. It could also be played with letters, numbers, shapes, colors, or whatever you can think to put on them!

During all this turkey fun we also learned an interesting fact about turkeys, only the males gobble.  Female turkeys just cluck. Maybe you already knew that, but we were surprised!