Thanksgiving projects in traditional kindergarten classrooms  often have  turkeys in them: wouldn’t you say?

And these turkey craft projects that are done for most children’s arts and crafts projects are the standard copycat models where there a specific copy for the children to create the same turkey as all the other children. Right?

It may even be an image like the one below that the children are asked to copy.

And I know its’ not easy figuring out a way to do turkeys without giving the children more exact instructions or a model to follow.

Which is why when you walk into most preschool or kindergarten classrooms right before Thanksgiving, or into homes that spends  time doing crafts projects, you will find the same model turkey strung across the room or hung on the refrigerator.

If you’ve been on this blog before you may know that I usually do not suggest doing crafts projects that cannot be done by in the educational art way. Giving children many choices and materials to create their own artwork.

And many of the time they actually cant’ be done.

I’ve told teachers  in the past “If you want to make a squirrel for fall, forget about it, give it up. Its not wroth it and there’s no way that you can figure out a way to make a squirrel in the educational art way.”

But even though a turkey seems like it falls  under this same banner of art that should be left by the wayside, a dear friend of mine, who is passionately into educational art figured out a way to do it with her students  which is depicted in the image above.

So what did she do?

She  found a unifying object that says “turkey” ( what looks like the back of the turkey)and gave the children lots of material to supplement this plumage, thereby allowing the children to actually create turkeys that are independent of each other.

(If you look at the image of the turkey above you can see what I mean about a standard part of the turkey that identifies the turkey)

The way she made this back of the turkey was by having the children trace their hands onto various types of paper, cut them out and IF they wanted to they were able to use them in their creation of turkeys.

This kind of sets the base for the art work and then they continue creating with feathers, thin pieces of paper, crafts sticks etc. (If you look closely at the picture you can determine some of the objects she gave them.)

Even though I was not there, I can assume that she showed them lots of pictures of turkeys in different positions to give them an idea of what a turkey looks like from all angles.

One of the problems when we give kids a model to copy is that we are giving them only one angle and one idea of what any given object looks like which totally limits their choices and creativity.

So there really is a way to make some traditional type of crafts projects and totally incorporating it into the educational art system.

It kind of starts making YOU think a little.

Enjoy your turkey making (and eating) and try to use your own creativy and ingenuity to come oup with more materials to enhance the children’s creativity.