I love Thanksgiving. I love the parade. I love mashed potatoes. I love gathering with family members. I love tur–ok, I don’t love turkey anymore. This week will mark my third Thanksgiving as a vegetarian. It is the hardest day of the year to abstain from meat.
This year I am also celebrating Thanksgiving from abroad. I decided to ease my homesickness by doing Thanksgiving activities with my students. This entailed the age-old hand turkey. Holidays are all about tradition, right?
My primary students traced, cut, and colored their posters with delight. They learned the terms turkey, beak, feathers, and wattle. (Wattle may not be the most useful English word, but since I asked them to draw one, I decided to teach it to them.) We also made a few rounds of “gobble, gobble” noises.
For the past few weeks, I have been volunteering at a refugee camp on Tuesday afternoons, and we did turkey crafts. I didn’t have a picture of an actual turkey with me, so the kids just thought they were making a funny looking bird. This craft required tracing hands for feathers and their feet for the body.
I felt pretty stressed out today after my high school lessons, but editing these pictures helped me gain some perspective about my week. Looking at their sweet smiles reminded me that I helped these children make a craft that they are proud of. Hopefully most of them also learned some new vocabulary and more about an American holiday.
I am thankful for the opportunity to work with all these kids. I will keep striving to be a teacher that they deserve, and I will try to be patient with myself, because I can’t offer them the best of myself if I am stressed out.
Super cute! Great turkeys! =)
Thanks.
I was also wrong in my post–it was my fourth turkey-less Thanksgiving.