Tom Turkey

For the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday Ciárán’s Kindergarten class had a project to work on at home over the weekend. Tom Turkey is a project where the kids cut out an outline/silhouette of a turkey and then disguise it do it doesn’t get caught and subsequently eaten.

tom turkey 2013 02

Ciárán initially wanted to disguise his Tom Turkey as a monster. I asked him how he wanted to do this. He asked if he could put a tail on Tom. My reply was “Of course, what kind of tail?” and Ciárán replied “A green one!” Green is his favorite color.

Following this line of planning a little bit eventually it was decided that Tom Turkey would be a tree. Ciárán then cut out Tom, who came home on Friday on a sheet of card stock. The “feet” were colored brown and everything else green. Because that’s the basic color scheme of a tree.

tom turkey 2013 01Then we went outside and searched for leaves. Lots of leaves. We went around the block picking up different types of leaves. At first Ciárán kept rejecting leaves because they were too wet (from the overnight frost) but I told him we could simply lay them out to dry for a while then we could work on fixing them to Tom.

Which we did.

tom turkey 2013 03After a couple of hours Ciárán and I worked together to tape the leaves on Tom. Ciárán directed where each was was to go, at least until some of the last few when I pointed out one side was getting filled up with coverage and the other side was more bare. I did most of the taping, but Ciárán did some as well.

The final product was very much Ciárán’s. While it isn’t the monster he initially wanted to do, it wound up being a great disguise. And a fun project for the two of us work on together.