Thanksgiving Dinner

We survived our 7th annual Thanksgiving Dinner!! For the last 7 seven years my daily living classes have prepared a Thanksgiving Dinner for their parents, teachers, and some classmates. We start by having the students create the menu and make invitations. I then had the students estimate prices for the groceries we needed to buy. They also had to look through the local grocery flyer's to look for sale items. After this, we went grocery shopping to buy all of our supplies. On the Monday before Thanksgiving break we cooked the turkey and made 6 pies. It was quite the adventure but went pretty smoothly. On Tuesday we peeled the potatoes. This is a great experience for the students. It is interesting to see the different levels of kitchen skills. On Wednesday the students were in my room for the morning putting everything together. Each student had a job that needed to be completed, whether it was making buns, punch, corn, cutting pies, mashed potatoes, stuffing, or sweet potatoes. With so much going on at once with many people in the kitchen, it is extremely important that the activities are organized. We also had to decorate the room and get it set up for our guests. It was a lot of work and we were putting on the final touches just moments before our guests arrived. We severed about 40 people and all of the kids loved it. I have one student that is very fragile emotionally. She really shined during this time. She had a smile on her face the entire day and was interacting with several students. It was so great to see. I truly enjoy doing this activity with my students. They look forward to putting this meal on every year. It allows them to show their parents and other teachers what they are able to do and they are very proud of themselves.