5 Fun Activities for November for Really Happy Students

Fun activities for November! Ah! November! I don’t know about you, but I LOVE November. My students are in the groove (hopefully), the Halloween craziness is over, and everyone is feeling Thankful that Thanksgiving is on it’s way! Here are some activities to make your students happy in the month of November. Yup, there are some freebies as well! Read on…

Fun Activities for November #1: Turkey in Disguise

I cannot take credit for this one, but this is my Favorite November Activity: Disguise a Turkey!

The gist is that you give your students a “naked turkey” and they decorate it to look like something else. Something that you wouldn’t eat for Thanksgiving! I have a really old #cringeworthy post about this activity that I did with my students in the past.

This makes a great at-home family activity. Parents really enjoy doing this one with their kiddos! They disguise the turkey, then write a description of the disguise and try to persuade the reader that he/she shouldn’t be eaten. The kiddos get a HUGE kick out of this activity!

Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano is a great book to introduce your students to this activity. I love reading this book to my students first as this silly turkey is doing his best to not get eaten for Thanksgiving (this is an amazon affiliate link. If you purchase anything using this link I get a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you!)

You can find this book read aloud by Marc Maron on Storyline Online as well. If you haven’t heard of Storyline Online, you really need to check it out!

#2 Celebrate a Classmate!

Another one of my favorite fun activities for November is Celebrate a Classmate! This activity is always a favorite at this time of year! We spend a lot of time building our classroom community and talking about what makes each of us special and unique. This writing activity is sure to make your students feel thankful for each other. Each student has a sheet of paper with their name at the top. The idea is we all go around the room and write a sentence about why we are thankful for each person in our classroom! The kiddos LOVE this!

There are many ways that you could do this, but it does take some time, so you will probably need a few days. One way would be to pick a student or two every day of November, then the kiddos write nice things about those 2 students and then send the sheets home. You could try doing them all at once and the students rotate through and sign everyone’s sheets, but this leads to not as thoughtful writing.

*You can get this sheet for free when you sign up for my newsletter below! You will find it in my Free Resource Library!

Fun Activities for November #3: STEM/STEAM!

STEM Activities are amazing, aren’t they? They really have it all and the students LOVE them! I have some super simple, easy-to-implement STEM activities that use play dough! Just print the mats (laminate for durability) and add playdough!

Want to try some before you buy some? I have a freebie in my Tpt store! These are always a hit with my students. These get them thinking and talking about their ideas! The mats also come with fun posters that show different playdough techniques, and ways to make different items with playdough!

This makes a great center activity or for Fun Friday. We would have a day before Thanksgiving Break where we spent the day doing hands-on activities! This station was their favorite!

#4 This or That!

This or That is a great way to get your students talking and moving!

This is a very versatile activity that can be done in a million different ways.  You can do these with a partner, you can do an Inside/Outside circle, you could use these as sharing prompts for your morning meeting, you can use them as a question of the day to collect data to make a graph, you could have the students stand up or sit down to answer the question, you could have the kiddos walk to a certain part of the room to answer the questions.  You could have these questions as a getting-to-know-you center.  You could use these as writing prompts.

Use these as a reference list for yourself, or you can cut them apart and hand them out to your students to discuss with a partner.  You could display and have the students graph their answers using a manipulative of some type (like magnets on a whiteboard). You can find a fun This or That Freebie in my free resource library!

Fun November Activities #5: Thanksgiving Menu!

You can’t have a Thanksgiving conversation without talking about Food! My mom used to work in a childcare center and she imparted these words of wisdom to me “You can always talk to a kid about food!” I love to talk about food, and so do most kiddos! They also have tons of opinions about food.

Let them create a super fun Thanksgiving Menu! They can choose what items they would most like to eat at Thanksgiving. These are super easy to put together as well. Just copy back to back. The kiddos cut the food choices off the bottom, color their choices, and glue them into the menu! Voila! When they are done, they can compare and contrast what their classmates chose! Fun conversations will ensue. 🙂 Interested? You can find this super fun menu here:

Thank you so much for stopping by! I hope you enjoyed my post about fun activities for November, and you grabbed all of your freebies! If you didn’t share this post so you don’t lose them! Sharing is caring! Thanks so much!

Happy Teaching,