A Healthy Apple Turkey!

I had the happy occasion to stumble across a website discussing how to create a themed food activity of an apple turkey. The website described using marshmallows, raisins, an apple, toothpicks, and a single candycorn. This seemed like a great idea to me all except for the ingredients! The activity itself seemed like it would provide my children with a fun, hands-on themed craft, but I wasn’t down with them gobbling up all of those marshmallows (see what I did there?).

Therefore, I decided that I would “healthify” this apple turkey. Feel free to leave me a comment and tell me how I could have done this even better!

Ingredients

One large apple, any color (organic preferred, of course)
Five to Six Toothpicks
Six Pretzels
One quarter cup o-shaped cereal (non-frosted)
One quarter cup dried fruit such as cranberries or raisins
One baby carrot
One tablespoon of peanut butter or hummus

Instructions

1. Clean the apple.
2. Twist the stem off of an apple. Perhaps you could stop to talk about apples in folklore and the child’s game of twisting the stem to guess their future mate.
3. Take one of the toothpicks and poke six holes into the surface of the apple where you want your tailfeathers to go. It is best if they are about half an inch from where the stem used to be and slightly spaced apart. You will be having the child put the pretzels into each of these holes. If a pretzel breaks, just stick some peanut butter or hummus on the pretzel to hold it into place.

4. Poke five to six of the toothpicks into the apple behind the pretzels. You can either use five and stagger the toothpicks in between each pretzel or use six and line them up with the pretzels. For the kids’ apples, I poked the toothpicks in first and had them thread their fruit and cereal onto each toothpick. I did mine in reverse order.

5. Once your apple has all the feathers in it, cut a baby carrot into three pieces. One piece will be from the cone-end and should be cut very small in length as it is the beak. The other two pieces should be roughly equal size and will make the feet. Have the children smear peanut butter or hummus on the carrot and stick it in place accordingly. Next, use two pieces of cereal for eyes (or two pieces of fruit).

6. Admire your handiwork.

Original Inspiration: Make An Apple Turkey

Making Connections

This activity could be used for a unit on apples, turkeys, Thanksgiving, nutrition (human body), or just for fun! The cereal and dried fruit could be used to work on pattern recognition and completion and the entire activity requires fine motor skills. These same ingredients could even be used to make other animals. I love following up activities with a good book. Quick searching found good reviews on these two books! If you have read one of them, would you tell me something about it?