Preschool Table Manners & Thanksgiving Fun

One thing that we are loving about homeschooling during the preschool years is taking some extra time to learn those important life skills and virtues like kindness, generosity, honesty and manners!  With Thanksgiving coming up it seemed like the perfect time to do a little lesson on table manners.  Now, I'm not sure how it works at your house, but with 3 kids 5 years old and under, meal times are still a work in progress here at our house!  We have a few things that have really helped, which are eating meals together as a family and trying to limit snacks between meals.  Yet, trust me when I say we still have a lot of work to do!

 

Well, Things to Share and Remember made this adorable activity called Yes Please, No Thank - You, where you print off different photos of typical foods that you eat during a Thanksgiving dinner, cut them out, paste them on paper plates and then get to practice lots of things! 

 

 

We first identified the foods, figured out which ones are healthy or not, which foods they had tried before, which foods they liked or didn't like, etc.  We then took time to pass the plates around the table and pretend eating.  This was a great reminder of how we sit at the table, how we chew properly, how we use our manners and say please and thank you, and how to ask to be excused.  We even discussed what proper dinner conversations are and proper voice levels (if anyone knows our middle child you would know that this is a big thing to practice)!

 

Playing "Yes, Please - No Thank you"!

 

One thing that we use throughout the year to help with manners is called Building Good Character: God Made Me to Be Part of A Family from Catholic Heritage Curricula.  It has great lessons in behavior and virtues with sticker charts already made up!  They also have read aloud stories to go with the lessons called Devotional Stories for Little Folks and Devotional Stories for Little Folks, Too!  We learned about this program when we were at the MN Catholic Homeschool conference last spring and we just love it!  They even have an entire section all about table manners!

Finally, we took some time for fun Thanksgiving painting.  All of our boys love crafts and I realized that I needed to figure out a good way to have things easily accessible so that it easy to take out and have activities be not too messy!  We use this Easy Clean Splash Mat and Vinyl Paint Aprons from Lakeshore Learning with all of our craft activities.  We keep all of our art supplies together under the sink in our homeschool room, and have easy clean up as well!  We decided to make a fun Thanksgiving canvas (we bought a set of 2 blank canvases for $7 at Hobby Lobby) to hang in our living room and then just have some free painting time!

 

Our Thanksgiving Canvas Art!