Thanksgiving Crafts to do with your Family

It’s always important to spend time with your kids. Doing crafts with your children not only allows you to spend time with them but helps them stretch their artistic wings.  On top of that, doing crafts around holidays can create strong memories for them, and maybe even lead to a tradition that you revisit year after year. Here are 5 fun thanksgiving crafts that may become part of your Thanksgiving traditions:

1. The Classic – Turkey Hand

Kids love getting messy. It’s a little treat for them, so, if you’re looking for a good Thanksgiving craft, you can’t go wrong with the classic turkey hand. Pour some paint on a paper plate and have your kid plop their hand down. Then, transfer their hand to a piece of paper, and use your creativity to add the eyes, feathers, and feet. Maybe throw some googly eyes on it, kids love googly eyes! Putting a date on the turkey and saving them each year will allow you to see your child’s turkey, and hand, grow bigger and bigger over each Thanksgiving!

2. Thankful Turkey

This is a fun craft where using construction paper, you help your children cut out a turkey with lots of different colorful feathers. With each feather, you ask your child what they’re thankful for, and write down that thing on the feather. It could be a person, a thing, or a place; anything that makes them feel grateful. After hanging the turkey on the wall or the fridge, it becomes something you can regularly revisit with them, and talk about the things for which they’re grateful.

3. Cornucopia Felt Board

This craft is a little more work for adults but has long-term play potential for children. Kids love felt boards! They love pulling the pieces on and off the board, and rearranging them; they love how tactile the process is. For this craft, you’ll end up with two projects – a reusable felt board, and a set of cornucopia felt pieces.

Go to your local craft store and get some felt pieces and printer transfer paper. Go home, load up your printer, and print out an empty cornucopia along with all sorts of fruits and vegetables: bananas, pumpkins, apples, anything you want.   Print out the pictures onto the transfer paper, iron the transfer paper onto the felt pieces, and you have yourself a fun cornucopia set. Then, create a felt board with felt, craft glue, and wood or cardboard!

4. Pilgrim Hat Design

Draw a picture of a pilgrim with a large, blank hat. Make lots of copies of your pilgrim on your computer printer. Give your preschooler four or five copies of the same picture and let them do lots of different pilgrim hat designs. This is a great craft because it emphasizes creativity by allowing your kid to be iterative and try lots of different ideas out.

5. Thankful Trace

Print out the word thankful and let your kid trace it. Kids love to trace words. It helps them practice all the skills they’re currently learning in preschool like letters, and how to hold a pencil. It’s also a great opportunity to talk to them about what it means to be thankful!

We love hands-on activities to further a child’s education and creativity. If you’d like to learn more about our preschool, and the fun activities we do with our students, please contact us.