Thanksgiving Math Activity for Kids

A Thanksgiving math activity that starts as art? Yes, please. Settle in with a few of your favorite Thanksgiving read-alouds to set the stage for this turkey art lesson!

There are so many good books about turkeys, but our hands-down favorite is ‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey. Every time we get to the page where the kids plan to save the turkeys by stuffing them in their shirts, my students start laughing and pointing. It’s not obvious to everyone at first, so when they finally notice it, it’s pretty funny.

It’s like how you think the last person to get a joke is so cute.😊

QUIRKY TURKEY GLYPH KEY

I’ve included step-by-step directions in the download to make it very easy for the children to draw their own turkey with your guidance. One thing I love about this lesson is that the directed drawing is also glyph-dependent, so each child’s Quirky Turkey is unique to them.

For example, this child’s turkey (according to the glyph key) shows that:

fall is not her favorite season
she likes to help cook dinner
she prefers apple pie to pumpkin pie
she’s going on a trip during the holiday break
and she thinks gravy is gross

THANKSGIVING MATH ACTIVITY

Once the directed drawings are complete, it becomes a Thanksgiving math activity. Because it takes us about 20-30 minutes to finish and color the turkeys, I usually save this for the next day. As a matter of fact, this whole lesson typically takes us about 3-4 days to complete. There’s a LOT of math involved!

The first part of the math lesson focuses on data collection. The kids love this part because it’s all about them and their friends! To facilitate this part, display all the Quirky Turkeys (whether you did them digitally or on paper) and show the children how to use the glyph key to tally the class data. This can take a while, so I recommend planning only data collection for your math block on this day.

Pairing the children for this activity and then checking in on tally totals at the end will help everyone be successful for the next day’s lesson. If the students don’t have the correct number of tallies on their data collection sheet, it will make the graphing lesson a challenge.

GRAPHING CLASS DATA

The next part of the Thanksgiving math activity is to graph the data collected the day before. As long as everyone has the correct number of tallies on their data sheet, the graphing goes pretty quickly. I model how to do 1-2 bars of the graph by counting the tallies for a particular item and then coloring the coordinating bar on the graph. If your students already have experience with bar graphs, this will be familiar to them.

ANALYZING THE DATA

Analyzing the class data is the last part of this Thanksgiving math activity. This is where a lot of mathematical thinking takes place. Some of the questions are more literal than others, but some require higher-order thought and problem-solving strategies. I encourage you to add in a few of your own questions depending on the math skills you’ve been working on. This will give you an opportunity to differentiate for your students.

👉TEACHER TIP: Challenge your students to write a question for the class to solve!

QUIRKY TURKEY SAMPLES

If you’re in a school with a 1:1 tech plan, your kids can make their Quirky Turkeys digitally. However, they’re just as cute (maybe cuter) drawn and colored on paper.

You can get everything you need for this Thanksgiving math activity here👉 QUIRKY TURKEY MATH LESSON. It’s best suited for children in 1st and 2nd grades, but it can also be used with third graders who need a little extra math support.