Turkey Sticker Sort

It’s a Thanksgiving activity for toddlers that’s simple, easy, and immediately doable. This turkey-themed activity is the perfect way to make it to nap time – and practice some math and fine motor skills at the same time. What a gem of an activity!

Why make a turkey sticker sort?

Activities themed to a holiday are starting a hit at our house – it’s the newest peas and carrots for us.

Easy activities are one of the best way to introduce, explain, and help immerse my kids in holiday traditions. They’re also budget friendly, at home, and fit around our nap time schedule.

Activities help kids build context around holidays that are otherwise very abstract to their new little lives.

The latest on our quest to make easy holiday activities: turkey sticker sort activity for Thanksgiving.

Related: Looking for Thanksgiving activities? Check out this list of 40+ easy Thanksgiving activities for toddlers.

Supplies

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• Construction paper
• Dot stickers

What an easy set up! I grabbed some construction paper and made a quick turkey body then four feathers to match the colors of the dot stickers.

Tip on dot stickers (don’t miss this!)

Dot stickers are such versatile little activity supply – we can’t have too many. We are so obsessed with them, from tracing shapes to matching numbers to making a board game: trust me, you can’t have enough dot stickers.

Here’s my dot stickers tip: remove the inner white part of the sticker sheet. This makes it so much easier for little toddler fingers to pick the stickers off.

Even kids as young as 15 months old can use stickers when you remove the middle white layer.

How to do a turkey sticker sort

My 2.5 year old is an old pro at dot sticker activities and she knew exactly what was going on here. She needed to sort her stickers onto the turkey.

She took her sheet and carefully began removing the stickers – and before I knew it she was on her third sheet and had been hard at work for 15 minutes.

She’s matching the stickers to the feather’s on the turkey’s body.

This kind of activity appeals to my daughter’s meticulous nature. This is her jam.

The learning in a turkey sticker sort

Turkey sticker sort was such an easy activity to set up – but my daughter is working on so many skills while she’s playing this.

• sorting skills
• fine motor skills
• visual discrimination
• color words/vocabulary

Sorting is the main skill she’s working on here, and sorting is so powerful. When a toddler is sorting, they’re making decisions, analyzing data, and grouping by attributes. It’s so much more than something simple.

But remember: We don’t need to justify kids doing activities, playing, or having fun. Play is where learning comes from in early childhood and we don’t need to measure it or dissect it to know that it’s there.

Using this activity to talk about Thanksgiving dinner

While my daughter worked, we talked about the upcoming holiday.

Thanksgiving for my family means a large dinner with relatives, a loud house, new foods, and a different schedule.

Thanksgiving is hard on adults. Imagine how it feels for a two-year-old?

Instead of setting her down for a big, heavy conversation – we used this activity as one of the many times we could chat about Thanksgiving.

Some of the topics we discuss:

• What is Thanksgiving?
• What happens on this holiday?
• What should she expect?
• Who will we see?
• How loud will it be?
• What’s the plan when she needs a break?
• What safe foods will she have to eat at Thanksgiving.

She doesn’t remember Thanksgiving last year when she was 21 months old. She needs these conversations and a plan for the day.

Like I mentioned earlier, activities are a great way to introduce holidays to toddlers, and this easy turkey sticker sort was perfect for us.

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