Big balloons, colorful floats, and marching bands—there’s so much for little ones to enjoy about a Thanksgiving Day parade! This festive tradition also makes a fun theme for November learning. Whether your family watches the parade together each year or you’re introducing it to your preschoolers for the first time, there are plenty of opportunities to bring that excitement into your homeschool or classroom with our Thanksgiving Parade pack!
Our Thanksgiving Day Parade Activities bring a playful parade theme to your fall learning plans! These centers give toddlers, Preschool, PreK, and TK learners a chance to join in the seasonal fun. Pair them with a favorite Thanksgiving read-aloud and make time for a pretend parade of your own! Let’s take a peek at the activities!
Table of Contents – JUMP to click ahead!
Fall Theme Sensory Bin
One of the easiest ways to add excitement and hands-on learning to your preschool week is with a themed sensory bin. So many of the activities in our Thanksgiving Parade Preschool pack incorporate a sensory bin, so it’s best to knock out the preparation early on! Our Fall sensory bin is always a hit—it’s simple to put together and offers tons of playful learning opportunities! Here’s how I like to set ours up!
FIRST, gather your materials. I like to use a plastic storage bin with a lid so I can cover and store the bin once it’s prepared. Choose your filler, like the dry oats we use in ours. Something about the oats really makes all the Fall colors in our parade preschool theme POP and gives children a very unique texture to experience. Once you’ve chosen your filler, fill your storage bin as much as you feel comfortable with (knowing each individual child can handle working with different amounts of materials).
NEXT, grab some extra Fall themed items like plastic apples and pumpkins, faux leaves, colorful pompoms for “balloons”, etc. These items make the perfect backdrop for the printable items in our preschool Fall packs! Scatter them throughout your sensory bin filler and watch the theme really come to life!
FINALLY, choose a space that you feel comfortable using the sensory bin with your child. I tuck ours away in our homeschool room with the rest of our Preschool manipulatives, and keep our sensory bin blanket nearby for when it’s time to get to work. The rule with our bins – everything stays on the blanket! This makes clean up SO much easier.
READY, SET, PLAY!!! When your sensory bin is not being used for the printable activities in our Thanksgiving Parade Preschool theme, allow children to explore freely! Watch them scoop, pour, dig, and more! I love taking our bin our when I need a little extra quiet time for homeschooling an older child, or honestly if I just need an extra minute to sip my hot coffee!
Thanksgiving Parade Theme Overview
This Thanksgiving Parade Preschool theme is sure to give your little learners TONS of fun practice! Children will have 6 center-style activities to choose from – 2 Math, 2 Literacy and 2 Fine Motor centers. In addition, I’ve included book recommendations for 5 scarecrow theme picture books and links to their read aloud videos on YouTube!
We love using a Preschool mini theme like this when we have some extra time in our learning time or are looking for an extra special addition to our regular themes! They’re perfect for fitting in as you can.
PS See how we use this theme in our Preschool scope and sequence by grabbing our FREE Preschool Curriculum Map below!
Counting Mat
Counting mats are super fun additions to sensory bins! To use this activity, children choose a parade announcer picture card and identify the number on their card. Then they’ll use the printable parade floats to build the matching number of floats on their Thanksgiving parade truck! To move on, simply remove the floats and choose a new card!
Spin-and-Feed Shapes
Add a spinner to an activity and BAM! You’ve got yourself a game! To play this fun “spin-and-feed” game, children spin to choose a shape. Then they’ll find a matching shape balloon from their sensory bin and “feed” it to the turkey float. Keep spinning and feeding until you’ve fed all the balloons to the Thanksgiving Parade float!
Upper and Lowercase Tracing
Learning to trace upper and lowercase letters, and seeing them in their pairs is such an important early literacy skill! Sometimes we get so caught up with the individual letter recognition that we forget how important it is for our littlest learners to see the pairs together so they seem them for what they really are – 26 sets of letters, not 52 individual letters.
For this reason, I love to have my littles practice tracing upper and lowercase letters together as much as possible. These tracing strips are a fun and festive way to get a little more tracing practice in your learning time!
Missing Letter Cards
Is your kiddo ready for a challenge that’s not TOO tricky? These missing letter cards are the perfect fit! Yes, their goal is to write the missing upper or lowercase letters on their Thanksgiving parade floats. BUT, the letter pairs are listed on the left side of the card so that struggling kiddos have a safety net while they’re trying to remember which letter is missing! I like to laminate these cards so we can come back to them all week after we’ve worked on our upper and lowercase letter tracing strips.
Balloon Patterns
Pattern strips are such a fun way for kiddos to work on their problem-solving and visual discrimination skills! Not only are they bright and festive, but they can be used in a variety of ways!
-Use the provided balloon manipulatives to build the patterns ON the strips.
-Continue the patterns by adding balloons to the END of the strips.
-Replicate the patterns with your own colors!
Build-a-Float
Okay, you know we could not have a Thanksgiving Parade preschool theme without including a chance to build your own parade float! This mat can be used over and over again – simply remove the floats to build all new scenes!
Ready to learn with your toddlers or Preschoolers ALL MONTH LONG?! You can save TONS when you grab this set of centers in our November Preschool Curriculum! The bundle includes 3 engaging November themes (like Fall festival, Thanksgiving, and pumpkin), complete with a week of lesson plans for each! You’ll also get 25 NO PREP Thanksgiving theme fine motor skills worksheets and crafts, and 40+ NO PREP Math and Literacy worksheets for extended practice!
Let’s hang out!
I hope this post helped you get a better look at our Thanksgiving Parade Preschool activities! Got questions? Let me know! I’d love to chat and get to know you better! You can find us below in some of our favorite places to hang out. Can’t wait to chat with you about your Preschooler’s learning journey!
SAVE THIS POST FOR LATER!
Was this post about our Thanksgiving Parade Preschool theme helpful? Make sure you can come back to this post as much as you need by saving it for later on Pinterest! Click the image below to save this pin to your Fall Preschool Activities board! Then, CLICK HERE to read about more of our favorite themed Preschool activities!
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