Create your own Thanksgiving stick puppets with this pie and turkey template. The template (found below) is a free, downloadable PDF for your personal use. Are you team pie or team turkey? I am definitely team pie! Make both and ask your family and friends to vote for their favorite Thanksgiving stick puppet. Find more fall crafts to make together: https://imaginationsrunningwild.com/fall-crafts/
Print the free Thanksgiving stick puppets template. Cardstock works best, but regular copy works too. Color your pie (I chose a pumpkin pie) and your turkey. Then cut around the dotted circles. Grab your two craft sticks and with glue or tape one stick to the back of each picture.
For the “whipped cream,” I added a cotton ball to the pie. I gently pulled on the cotton ball to make it look fluffier before gluing it on. Now your pie is complete! Let it dry before playing with your stick puppets.
Who doesn’t love playing with puppets? Puppet crafts are so much fun for children to make and to play with! I love when we are able to make a scene on a paper plate for stick puppet to explore. Make this cute turkey stick puppet craft with your little one and enjoy watching your puppet explore the straw and fall leaves in this scene. This interactive craft is tons of fun and lends itself well to imaginative play.
Print off the turkey scene stick puppet craft template (free PDF download). Color the turkey, rolled up straw bales, haystack, and fall leaves. After coloring, cut out your pictures. I try to keep things simple by cutting a border around the pictures rather than exactly along the lines. Once you glue them onto a white paper plate, you really can’t see the white borders around the pictures anyway.
Have an adult use a box cutter to cut a slit along the smooth center of the plate. The slit in the example is a little less than halfway up the plate. Before slicing, make sure that the craft stick will be able to stick up through the proposed slit and move around. The slit should go all the way along the smooth part of the plate, stopping before both ridged outer edges.
Now that you have colored all of your pictures, glue them onto your plate. Check to make sure that all of the pictures are glued down tight so that your turkey stick puppet doesn’t get stuck under any edges that may be sticking up.
Glue your turkey to end of a craft stick and let’s play! Slip your puppet through the slit and move your puppet around so that your turkey can play in the straw.
It’s Turkey Time! Are you ready to say “Gobble, Gobble?” Turkeys are pretty cool birds. My son and I have enjoyed reading turkey stories and one non-fiction turkey book! Here are some of our favorites turkey books. We hope your library will have these available for you and your preschooler to enjoy together.
In this non-holiday story, a turkey family takes a train trip to the snow. Told in rhyming text with humorous illustrations, preschoolers will enjoy the turkeys’ travels and their snow-day fun! It might even inspire some to want to play outside too! Steve Metzger has several other turkey books too–check your library for his other books.
This is a very silly, rhyming, backwards counting story featuring turkeys! The humorous illustrations add to the turkeys’ goofy antics. Preschoolers will enjoy the 10 turkeys sitting on a fence countdown. They will love as the turkey’s roller-skate and swing from vines until the fence breaks and none of them are left. While not a holiday story, this is still a good read for fall and good practice for calling out, “gobble, gobble, gobble!”
My son loves these books! The turkey story is one of his favorites. In this book, the turkey is supposed to make an appearance in the school Thanksgiving play, but it gets stage fright and runs away. The kids are racing around the school, trying to catch the turkey! The wily turkey manages to elude all of the students’ traps. The happy ending will be a hit with young readers 🙂
A town is desperate for a turkey meal on Thanksgiving, but there are no turkeys to be found. They come up with an idea to lure a turkey to them by hosting a turkey-themed art contest, claiming they need a plump and perky turkey to be their model. Of course, they promise yummy food for the turkey who agrees. A clever turkey agrees to be the model. Knowing the town’s sneaky reason for holding the contest, the turkey ends up tricking all of the people and getting away with a tummy full of yummy food.
School is about to start and turkey is excited to join the boys and girls at start of the new school year. In preparation, turkey organizes a farm-yard school for the animals to practice their school skills–writing their names, counting, playing at recess–so that they will be ready to join the kids. Unfortunately, turkey (and the other animals) aren’t allowed to go to school. But school is so much fun and the animals don’t want to miss out! Turkey comes up several disguises to try and sneak into school, but the animals keep getting caught. Finally turkey comes up with a great plan to get into the school as the Farm Day band, where they sing “Old McDonald” with the class.
This is the hilarious story of a turkey who tries numerous disguises in order to avoid becoming Thanksgiving dinner. Each farm animal costume that turkey tries fails to completely disguise him! Just when it seems that all hope is lost, turkey gets his best disguise of all! You will laugh when you see turkey’s brilliant costume idea 🙂
I find these books amusing and the preschoolers at storytime giggle at them. My friend, however, can’t stand the old lady’s silliness (I keep telling her that she’s not the target audience). My son agrees with me, so we added this one to our list. In this installment of the series, the old lady eats a bunch of Thanksgiving-themed items, including a turkey, a football, and a cornucopia among other stuff. What is this old lady up to? Why she’s making a Thanksgiving parade float, of course 🙂
8. Setting the Turkeys Free by W. Nikola-Lisa–
In this sweet ode to children’s imaginations, this story takes us on an creative adventure with handprint turkeys! Using craft supplies, the child builds a turkey pen out of popsicle sticks. Uh-oh, Foxy the fox is coming. Can the child save the turkeys? You’ll love watching this child’s imaginative story unfold! Your kiddo will probably want to make their own handprint turkeys after reading this 🙂
My son wanted to learn more about real turkeys, so we checked out Animals on the Farm: Turkeys from the library. This book has awesome pictures and was written at easy-to-understand level without being boring. My son was so intrigued by how weird turkeys’ heads look! One of the cool things about this book is that teaches the names for a turkey’s body parts, like a wattle and a snood. See if your library has a copy!
I hope you and your kiddo enjoy these turkey books as much as my son and I did! To help cover the costs of this site, I’ve joined Amazon’s Affiliate program. If you buy a book through one of my links, then I get a small percentage of the sale. thank you for your support! Happy Reading 🙂
Turkey Puppet Craft:
Turkeys are so much fun! We made a turkey paper bag puppet to go along with all of our stories. My son had a blast running around the house with his puppet, yelling “gobble, gobble, gobble!”
