Thanksgiving Fluency Turkey for ALL Phonics Skills – Free Printable
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Get a free printable Thanksgiving-themed Fluency Turkey! Students can practice any phonics skill by writing words containing that concept on feathers, then gluing them on the turkey!
🦃 Why We Love It
There are so many reasons to love this Thanksgiving-themed Fluency Turkey for students working on different, important reading skills! Here’s why we think it’s a great resource for teachers:
👉 Multi-Sensory: Research has shown that authentic,,multisensory instruction is a key element in helping young learners master skills and retain explicitly taught concepts. This activity has kids writing, reading, cutting, coloring, and pasting, so they’re participating in true multimodal learning (visual, auditory, and tactile).
👉 Totally Customizable: You can use this activity for students of all levels and you can easily scaffold for kids within your groups or classroom, too. Because you can use this activity for any phonics skill that is part of your structured literacy scope and sequence, you can completely customize based on age, grade, and reading level.
👉 Engaging & Fun: It’s so important to make lessons fun for kids, especially around holidays! My students really got into decorating and personalizing their turkey while working on important phonics skills! They even named their turkeys, and they came up with some really creative and silly names like Phil the Fluency Turkey, Todd the Turkey, and Gobble-Gobble Gary. We also call the fluency portion of the activity a “Turkey Trot” as kids read the words aloud, quickly and accurately.
👉 Targeted and Meaningful: This activity is an intentional way to target skills needed for kids to be successful and build that solid foundation. It isn’t just fun, but it provides meaningful practice to help kids gain confidence in their reading and spelling abilities.
🖍️ How to Use It
This resource can be used with a whole group, small group, or as independent work.
The general procedure is:
- Write the phonics skill on the turkey’s belly. Cut out all the turkey feathers on page 2.
- Write words that contain that concept on the turkey feathers.
- Color in the turkey and feathers, then glue them on the turkey!
- Read for fluency. Kids all of the words out loud 3 times, coloring in one of the acorns every time.
ℹ️ Expert Tips & Info
- You can save a little time by printing the feather pages on colored paper.
- Use some of our handy word lists for dictation: CVC words, Silent e Words, R-Controlled words, Long A words, Long E words, Long I words, Long O words, and Long U words.
- If using for independent practice or centers, give kids a decodable book and have them search for words with the chosen concept!
- Pair this activity with sound boxes. Kids will make the sound-spelling correspondences needed for accurate spelling before writing the words on the turkey feathers.
- Use this as the template for their weekly spelling test. Using the words on the week’s list, kids write them on feathers rather than on a regular, boring sheet.
- After they have completed the activity, kids can practice reading their words aloud to friends, building confidence.
🍗 More Free Thanksgiving Resources
🖨️ Download & Print
We’d love to hear about your experience using this resource!
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