We have been reading a variety of books about Thanksgiving and in many of our books, the authors show the historical story of how the Pilgrims sailed across the ocean and came to a new land only to find that they didn’t know how to survive in this new land. Â What the children have found most interesting in these books are the Indians who made their own bows and arrows and taught the Pilgrims how to hunt for food. Â Building on the children’s interest we made our own bows and arrows and then went on a turkey hunt…
We had to brainstorm what we would need to make our bows and arrows and the children easily decided that we could make them from sticks – so off they went to gather sticks. Â The children had to find sticks that were long and perhaps had a bit of a curve or arch for their bows and then shorter sticks for their arrows. Â This meant we had to do lots of searching, comparing, and collecting of sticks for our hunt…
We also needed turkeys to hunt. Â Each child threw together a paper bag turkey but we noticed that we had flat turkeys and no hunter wants to eat a flat turkey…
The children took their paper bag turkeys outside to fill them up with leaves. While we were stuffing our turkeys with leaves, one of my students asked me, “Mrs. Stewart, Do turkeys eat leaves?” Â What a great question!…
Once our turkeys were stuffed and the ends were tied off, the children went back outside and hid their turkeys…
And finally we went back to making our bows and arrows…
The children wrapped their bows with a special kind of tape (which I will share more about soon) while Mrs. Courtney and I tied a large rubber band on the ends of each bow to make the string of the bow…
Here is a look at a few of our completed bows…
Now that we had our bows ready to go, the children went outside to gather more sticks for their arrows and hunt for their turkeys….
I was a little worried that we might have kids accidentally shooting each other with their arrows but I didn’t have to worry because we spent most of our time just trying to figure out how to hold the bow and the arrow in the right position in order to get the bow to spring up into the air. Â This was quite challenging and most of the children did not have the coordination to get an arrow to shoot anywhere at all. Â The entire turkey hunt preparation and adventure was lots of fun for the children and the children loved the adventure of it all and so did I!
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