Thanksgiving Craft Ideas

November 16, 2012 by

Can you believe that Thanksgiving is only a week away!  Somehow it’s coming a lot faster this year for me.  This whole year seems to zoomed by with my dad’s cancer and with me helping out the family being 600 miles away.  All in all, I do look forward to this Thanksgiving! For the first time this year, I ordered a brined turkey rubbed with savory blend of herbs and spices from New Seasons, my local whole foods store. All we need to do is pop the bird in the oven and turkey’s ready in a few hours. That will give us lots of time to make some memories with our family. This Thanksgiving, I hope you’ll make time to create some family memories as well. To help, here’s a couple more fun crafts that I came across and thought worth sharing. Just click on the link under each picture to get the things needed and instructions. Have a blessed Thanksgiving!

Pleated Paper Turkey

Chocolate Turkey Fondue 

Filed Under: Thanksgiving Tagged With: ,

Thankful Basket

November 6, 2012 by

As we enter into this season of thanks, I wanted to create a home environment where my kiddos can express their thanks to God for His blessings. At the beginning of the month, we started our Thanksgiving tree. Now we wanted to share with you our thankful basket. This simple activity not only helps all us to recount our blessings, but is also a language arts lesson. This is how our thankful basket works.

Materials:

Basket or another container
paper
pen or pencil

Instructions:

Set a basket, precut papers and pencil on a table.  Anyone in the family can write and drop their thankful messages into the basket. On Thanksgiving day, we’ll pass around the basket and read some or all of the messages.

Note:

Since Buddy’s learning to write, I encouraged him to write as much as he wanted for himself and help his siblings. He did so eagerly. He’s learning without even knowing it!

The day before Thanksgiving, we passed the basket around after dinner and we read all the messages in the basket. Here’s Buddy reading one of them.

Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving activity that you would like to share. Please drop a note in the comments sections.

Adapted from Shirley Dobson’s books Let’s Make a Memory.

Filed Under: Fall, Indoors Activities, Thanksgiving Tagged With: ,

ThanksgivingTree

November 4, 2012 by

 

To start off the Thanksgiving Holiday, I decided to do a craft with the kids that will allow them to have a hands-on experience.  The idea of this craft is to get them to write down one thing that they’re thankful for each day.  Through this exercise, I am hoping that they are mindful of the many blessings that God has given to us as a family.  So, here’s the Thanksgiving Tree that’s in our kitchen.  Enjoy!

Materials:

2-3 yd. brown butcher paper (I think mine was 24″ wide, got it at a local educational store)
Fall leaves
Painter’s tape (doesn’t ruin your wall)
Marker for writing
Strips of paper (optional)

Instructions:

1. Lay out brown butcher on floor.
2. Sketch out a tree on butcher paper with black marker and cut it out.
3. Tape tree to a wall with marked side facing into the wall, and start decorating your tree with some fallen leaves.
4. Everyday, have each family member write down what they’re thankful for on a leaf and simply tape leaf onto tree using painter’s tape.

 Here’s our leaves after our first day.

Our Thanksgiving tree after day 1. Pretty soon, it’ll be filled with beautiful leaves with all our blessings.

Note: I bought these foam leaves from Michaels, and decided I’ll reuse them in the years to come, so I cut strips of paper for writing instead of writing directly on the leaves themselves. Remember Michaels and Joann both take each other’s coupons. There’s a lot of 40 or 50% off coupons out there at this time of year.

Does your family have a neat way of celebrating this season of thanks? I’d love to hear from you. Please share some of your traditions.

Filed Under: Crafts, Indoors Activities, Thanksgiving Tagged With: ,