Thankful Turkey Journal and Craft Activity for Special Education

The act of gratitude is important for everyone, and that includes our students with disabilities. It might be hard for our non-verbal students to express what they are thankful for, so I created these differentiated thankful turkeys to help!




Symbol Support

With this thankful turkey resource, students will be able to use the symbols to help them think about and choose the things they are thankful for. Then they can paste them on a turkey or on a journal to show what they are thankful for.


5 Thankful Categories

There are 5 different categories for students to choose what they are thankful for in each area. This can help everyone, even myself, think of the different areas in their lives and what they are thankful for in terms of food, nature, people, etc!


Print and Use

The best part about this activity is that it is super easy for teachers to print and give to students. Just choose the levels needed for your students, print and go!!! 


Differentiated for Your Whole Classroom

The levels included make this activity great for special education classes of all levels, including elementary classrooms and inclusion classrooms. The journals are also age appropriate for high school levels.


Levels include:

  • symbols to cut and paste on the turkey or journal pages
  • tracing sentence starters (and then fill in the blanks with symbols or write it out)
  • writing each sentence
  • paragraph writing


Printable or Digital

The turkey craft also includes options such as print and go - students can color and write (or cut and paste) the things they are thankful for) or they can cut out the turkey and feather and put the turkey together themselves. 



You can even use the version on Google Slides for students to drag and drop their thankful items onto their digital thankful turkey!



Here's what teachers are saying about this resource:


"Bought this last minute to use for Thanksgiving and loved it! It was very easy to set up digitally and use in Google Classroom which my students are familiar with." -Melissa


"This product was extremely helpful in allowing my students with significant disabilities, including receptive and expressive language delays, to comprehend and make choices on what they are thankful for. It also allowed for them to have a voice in the activity which is great. " -Morgan 


"Used this as a group speech activity where students shared what they were thankful for. We glued the finished product on large construction paper for their Thanksgiving place mats and made a video of each student stating what they were thankful for. I loaded up a go-talk with leftover icons for non verbal students." -Hilary


"This was exactly what I was looking for! Most of my students are non-verbal and this was such a great activity for them! Parents absolutely loved the craft when it came home, I'm looking forward to using this for many years to come in my classroom!" -Lya





Grab the digital download and use it in your classroom today! 

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