Turkey Feather Math Thanksgiving Activity

In kindergarten right now Lovey is working on beginning addition, and a large part of that is learning about number pairs. She’s exploring the many different number pairs you can use to make up different numbers. To help her we’ve been doing a few different hands-on activities. This is one we’ve tried in honor of Thanksgiving in a few weeks.

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We started by tracing the palm and thumb of her hand on brown paper. We made a bunch of the “turkey bodies” so we could practice a lot of different number pairs. Then we added some basic features to make them look a little more like turkeys. If you are planning to use these in the classroom over and over again, you might want to laminate them.

I placed those turkey bodies with some jumbo colored craft sticks that we received from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

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During math time we were working on number pairs for 5, so I only set out turkey bodies with the number 5 on them.

Lovey sat and created different number pairs for 5 using the craft stick “feathers.” At this time we talked about the different pairs, but did not write anything down. You could extend the activity by writing the different number pairs found and/or writing an addition sentence to go with the turkey creation.

As Lovey finished learning about the number pairs for each individual number to 10, I started to introduce turkey bodies with different numbers as a a way to review the number pairs.

Take a peak at some additional ideas for Turkey Feather Math in the video tutorial below.

Classroom Adaptations

Give all students at one table turkey bodies with the same number and ask them to work together to find as many different number pairs as they can.
After doing this activity with a variety of turkey bodies, give students one last turkey body without a number on it. Have them glue it in their math journals and choose a number to write on the body. Then ask them to draw turkey feathers to show a number pair for the number and finally write the addition sentence.

So there you have a little math mixed in with a fun Thanksgiving activity.

Continue the fun and learning with these hands-on roll and color turkey math activities. Depending on your goals kids can practice color recognition, shape recognition, matching sets, matching numbers, addition and more.