School Sparks - Kindergarten Readiness

Thanksgiving worksheets make learning fun

Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to surround yourself with family and friends and spend chilly afternoons bundled up inside together. Thanksgiving worksheets are a wonderful way for you to work with your child during the long holiday to help him practice important school-related skills.

Thanksgiving worksheets capitalize on the bounty of Thanksgiving images children are familiar with - Native Americans, Pilgrims, turkeys, pumpkins, cornucopias, and many more and use these images to captivate a child’s attention as he explores important activities such as improving auditory processing skills, practicing visual discrimination skills, learning new sight words, associating letters with the sounds they make, and practicing handwriting skills.

Tips for using these Thanksgiving worksheets

The Thanksgiving worksheets on this page cover a broad range of topics introduced or reinforced during kindergarten. This includes: auditory processing (following directions), handwriting, sight words, visual discrimination, phonemic awareness of matching letters to their sounds, and syllable identification.

The order in which you complete these worksheets is really up to you and should be guided by your child’s interests. If your child loves writing letters (or learning to write his letters), you can jump right in with the Thanksgiving letter tracing worksheets. Or, if your child has an expansive sight word vocabulary, he will likely be eager to add a few new words to it and will enjoy the Thanksgiving sight word worksheets.

For younger children who are not yet capable of tracing letters or memorizing sight words, I would suggest beginning with the visual discrimination worksheets. The pictures are colorful and engaging for young children and children as young as two years old can likely spot which picture in each row is different from the other pictures.

If your child is interested in additional visual discrimination activities, Thanskgiving is certainly a great time for it! For example, the closer we get to Thanksgiving, the more pictures of turkeys seem to appear in store windows, on signs, in magazine advertisements, or during television commercials. During the next few weeks, challenge your child to look for pictures of turkeys in his environment. Since each turkey will likely look different, your child will need to use his strong visual discrimination skills to identify each turkey. As your child spots turkeys, you can discuss with him whether the picture shows a realistic turkey or a cartoon-style turkey, which will further hone his visual discrimination skills.

Extra activities to supplement the Thanksgiving worksheets

• Give your child a used magazine published in November and encourage him to trace over the headlines. It is likely that many headlines will include common Thanksgiving words that your child can practice tracing over.
• As you unpack groceries for Thanksgiving dinner, show your child the boxes and labels and encourage him to identify the sight words he knows. For example, the common words pie, pumpkin or corn will likely appear on many of the packages.
• With tape or string, create a straight line on the floor and take a picture of a pumpkin at one end of the string and a picture of a turkey at the other end of the string. Giving your child directions such as “take 1 step towards the turkey” or “take two steps towards the pumpkin,” see which end of the line your child will reach first.
• Read Thanksgiving books to your child such as “A Plump and Perky Turkey” by Teresa Bateman. Each time your child hears a new word related to Thanksgiving or asks you what a word means, encourage him to isolate the beginning sound of that word and name the letter that makes the corresponding sound. As you read, you can also ask your child repeat the newly learned words after you, clapping his hands once for each syllable. This activity will reinforce the idea that syllables are parts of a word.