Thankful Turkey

I remembered making version(s?) of toilet tube turkeys as a child and decided to try it with Dylan a couple weeks ago. Rather than just making the turkey, we talked about a few things we were thankful for and incorporated them into the design. A simple way to address this season of Thanksgiving with my 3 year old and remind us daily as we see it on our mantle just how blessed we are.

Supplies

• toilet paper tube
• construction paper
• crayon or pencil or pen
• scissors
• glue (we used a glue stick and glue dots)
• googly eyes (optional)
• feathers (optional - could use instead of paper)
• markers (optional)

To start our project, I drew feather shapes onto 4 pieces of construction paper. We talked about things we were thankful for and I wrote one on each feather. (Note here's where I made a small error - didn't plan ahead enough so two of our thankful things are upside down! Oops! My advice, write some on the far left & some on far right to leave enough space to glue and still see words.)

I held the paper while Dylan practiced his cutting skills with his new scissors - he loves any excuse to use them!

Next he glued each of the feathers to one side of the tube.

I helped him add glue dots to the back of the googly eyes. The dots make it so much easier for him to stick the eyes and they stay in place immediately - no waiting on glue to dry.

Then he glued on the beak and wattle I had cut out for him.

Here's the completed turkey:

And, yes, he thinks the wattle is the mouth. :)

A version of this post originally ran on November 1, 2012 for Arts & Crafts Thursday at Notes from a Mom in Chapel Hill blog here.