Super Easy Thanksgiving Activity for Kids To Be Thankful

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We love the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s going to be a little different this year. To keep our spirits high, we thought of this super easy Thanksgiving activity for kids.

Normally, we gather with our immediate and extended families. Kids run around everywhere. The house is packed.

Our bellies are full with appetizers as we stretch them out to make room for all the turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes.

This year will look a little different as we remain cautious because of Covid-19. Our gathering will simply be our family of three and just one grandparent.

Why Did We Decide on A Thanksgiving Activity For Kids?

Our daughter’s school inspired us to find a Thanksgiving activity to do at home. For the month of November, they asked parents to donate food for a local food bank.

It was our job to explain why we were collecting food to donate to our kids. The school would reinforce this message with the kids.

We explained to our daughter that we are very fortunate to have food to eat. This is not the case for a lot of families around us.

By donating food it’s a way for communities to come together to help families in need.

Each week at school our daughter fills the donation basket with dry pasta, beans, rice, or canned meat.

At age three she has been able to understand that we give this food away to families we don’t even know. It’s our little way of giving back and a great way to show and give thanks during this Thanksgiving season.

Everyone Needs Easy At-Home Activities

Kids learn a lot through hands-on activities.

With any activity, if you have the time, it’s especially important to talk through what you’re doing with them. Why are you doing this project? What’s special about this?

During this season we wanted to reinforce giving thanks through a fun activity.

As you can probably relate, we spend a lot of time at home now, so why not do something fun together!

This means we have been getting creative. We find activities that will capture our toddler’s attention for at least 30 minutes.

The best activities are ones where we do not need to spend a ton of money or use a lot of time preparing.

The Thanksgiving Tree Activity

One of the best things we do is use what we already have around the house.

We decided to make something with our light-up tree we use during Easter. Rather than hang eggs from the tree’s branches, we decided to use leaves.

While it could look nice for a day, using real leaves could get messy. We didn’t want to walk into the room one day to find crumbled leaves everywhere.

Kids are notorious for rearranging hanging things. We know our daughter would crush those leaves in a day!

We decided to use a rubber leaf stamp and a red and green ink pad to create our own paper leaves.

Our daughter loves stamps so this would be a guaranteed fun activity for her.

We set up a table with the tree and separated the tree branches.

Next we cut out pieces of paper using toddler scissors. In our example we used heavier cardboard paper and traced the rubber stamp to make the cutouts. We left the cutouts as squares. No need to take the extra time to cut out a leaf shape unless you’re super ambitious.

We then let our daughter stamp green, red, and then green/red leaves on the pieces of paper.

She loved mixing the colors and they did make for beautiful leaves.

To my surprise this wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be. She was pretty accurate pressing the stamp to the paper and didn’t get any ink on the table.

We did have to help her a tiny bit applying the right amount of pressure to the ink pad and then to the paper. After a few assists, she got the hang of it.

We Incorporated What We Are Thankful For Into the Tree’s Leaves

This was a good opportunity to discuss with our daughter what giving thanks means. We gave her some ideas of what we were thankful for as examples.

Need some ideas to share with kids?

Our Thanksgiving printable lets you go through the alphabet with your kids. Think of a word or phrase for each letter for which you’re thankful to fill in the blanks.

Here’s what our daughter was thankful for:

• Mommy
• Daddy
• Good food
• Her grandparents
• All of her family

What do you think your kids would say?

Since we left a border around the leaf, we wrote all the things we were thankful for in the white space.

You could also cut out the leaf shapes if you prefer not to have a border. This would require more time though.

We then took a hole punch to the cut outs and had our daughter place them on the tree branches.

The hole punch may be tough for your kids to do alone, so give them a hand.

Final Thoughts – Be Thankful & Share This Activity With Your Family

This super easy Thanksgiving activity took about 30 minutes to do with our daughter.

Depending on what you have at home, the prep time could be as little as five minutes just to gather the supplies. The actual cutting can be done with your kids.

You don’t have to use a stamp. You could easily draw leaves on paper. Another alternative is to use a leaf puncher like this.

We liked the idea of a stamp. Our daughter was able to choose the leaf colors and mix and match if she felt creative, which she did!

The leaves stamped with a mix of red and green were beautiful.

Here’s the Thanksgiving Printable which includes an extra coloring activity page!

Let us know in the comments how you liked this activity or if you have other suggestions. Would love to hear how other families are celebrating Thanksgiving.

Recommended Products for Thanksgiving Activity Thankful Tree

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