Thanksgiving Activities and Multiplication Turkey Feather Arrays

Well this week is Thanksgiving. I like to have the kids do a cute turkey art project and write about what they are thankful for….usually.

Multiplication Array activities using art turkeys.

 So as we are just learning the beginnings of multiplication, I decided to use the rainbow turkey feathers (rectangles of colored butcher paper off the rolls) to do multiplication “ARRAYS”.

Artistic turkeys and ways to use the feathers for more than just some colorful art!

Stuffed Turkeys with multiplication “array” feathers.

So I cut out 16 inch strips of 6 colors of the rainbow in butcher paper. We had red, orange, yellow, green blue, purple, pink.  The kids had to draw columns and rows and make a rectangle, like I did on the doc camera. Then they had to count the resulting squares and come up with the 2 factors for their arrays.

The Thanksgiving Cupcakes for a party we hosted at school. I made Scarecrow Cupcakes and Turkey Cupcakes and topped them with some candies and paper toothpick toppers. They were so cute!

 Turkey and Scarecrow Cupcakes. More TURKEYS! Yay!

These turkey cupcakes were easy to make. They were pretty tasty too for our Teacher Holiday party last Friday. If you want to see more check out my cooking blog called Weekday Chef.

Here were some more turkeys another 2nd grade teacher made for our party. These are cute too with white chocolate chip eyes.

Here are some of my class Making their Multiplication arrays on our turkey’s rainbow colored feathers!

We started with pretty easy arrays, 3 x 3 and 4 x 1. Then the kids just did their own multiplication arrays  after we did 3 together……some they did were simple, some were more advanced. (Differentiation at work!) The kiddos got pretty good about coming up with the factors and products on their arrays using our turkey feathers.

 Then after we were done making 6 arrays on rainbow colors, we rolled them into a raindrop shapes with the arrays inside, then glued them to the back of our brown stuffedturkeys and added the things we were thankful for on the top of the feathers.

Cute Thanksgiving turkeys with “reasons why we are thankful” written on tops and multiplication arrays inside the colorful loops!

Then we glued the feathers onto a stuffed (with newspaper strips)8 inch brown circle of butcher paper which was the turkey body.Then we colored turkeys and glued them onto the brown bodies. They turned out darling! They made such a colorful bulletin board too. And the kids had an easy time gluing on the feathers.

You can barely see the arrays on the insides of the colorful feather “loops”. Then on the outside we wrote 1 thing we were thankful for on each feather.

Then we glued the “stuffed” brown butcher paper circle bodies to these colorful turkeys we did for art and saved them. Here is a particularly artistic one. I loved it!

Then we wrote some Turkey Acrostic Poems to go with our artistic multiplication turkeys…..

 Then we did an acrostic poem with the topic of Turkey. They had to come up with anything that reminded them of Thanksgiving Day. We had a big brainstorm on the board of all of the ideas the kids had for first words to make up T-U-R-K-E-Y poems.

After we brainstormed beginning words for our Thanksgiving Time Poems….

I was pretty impressed with words like TRADITION, RELATIVES AND EXTENDED FAMILY. Yup! These kiddos are very creative writers!

Turkey Day Acrostic Poems……

Kids are all doing multiplication arrays on the “turkey feather” papers for our Art Turkeys.

I think they love this little Thanksgiving Turkey Art project. What do you think?

We turned the arrays to the inside of the loops  and on the outside wrote one thing we were thankful for on each feather. (so original…I know!)


We made little pinecone turkey placecards last year when I had a small class. If you want the tutorial it is HERE. They sure are a cute craft too! This year I didn’t get very many pinecones dropping off my tree. Maybe I’ll just have to make them with the 3 granddaughters age 3 to 7.

  This is a fun song to sing on TURKEY MAKING DAY!  

Albuquerque, He’s My Turkey!    
(Sung to the tune of ‘Clementine’)

Albuquerque he’s my turkey
Oh he’s feathered and he’s fine
He wobbles and he gobbles
And I’m awfully glad he’s mine.

He’s the best pet You could ever get.
Better than a dog or cat.
Albuquerque he’s my turkey
And I’m awfully glad of that.

Albuquerque he’s my turkey
He’s so cozy in his bed
Because for Thanksgiving dinner
We had scrambled eggs instead.

I thought later how fun it would have been to “become” the turkey and write a persuasive essay on why you should NOT be eaten for Thanksgiving.  For Read Alouds We read funny books like
T IS FOR TURKEY     
And….A Turkey for Thanksgiving. Then we will do the Hokey Pokey (Turkey Pokey) for P.E. How do you think they will like THAT? hehe….