Thanksgiving Crafts for Kids

I was cleaning out the basement yesterday and came upon our box of Thanksgiving crafts. I thought it would make a fun blog post today. Some of these were made last year, and some were made years ago. I try to find something new to add to the collection each year. It's nice to have a variety of crafts from my kids at all different ages.

I'll start with the name cards for dinner. We have one for each member of the family, and we also have a few that say "Happy Thanksgiving". We typically like to invite guests to Thanksgiving and it's nice to have something to place at their seat.

The body and head is made with a thumb print, and the tail fan is made from dipping the tips of your finger in paint. With a marker I drew on the turkey's face and legs.

I believe it was just last year that we made our Pilgrims and Indians. You can see by the different drawings of the faces how old each child was.

This idea came from the Family Fun website.

Several years ago, we all made place mats out of brown paper sacks. We cut the sides and bottom off to make it thinner. To add a picture to each side, we cut a window from the middle a little smaller than 4x6 inches. If you don't make it smaller, the picture may fall through. When both sides were decorated, and the paint was dry, we covered them with clear contact paper. This makes it easy to wipe down spills.

This is probably the oldest craft of them all. My daughter made it when she was two years old. To make the body of the turkey you trace around the child's foot. The tail fan is made out of hand prints. For our turkey, we have 8 different hand prints cut out of construction paper. The turkey used to have googly eyes on it, but, after several years passing, they seemed to have been misplaced.

Every year our church has a large Thanksgiving dinner where we celebrate together as a church, typically the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Each year there is a different Friendship Group in charge of decorating. A couple years ago, when it was our turn, we made a fun kid craft to put on the tables. We had two families in our group at that time, and didn't have a lot of extra money to purchase decorations with. This was a great idea if you're on a budget and you need to plan for a large crowd.

I love these table runners we came up with. The church had all the supplies we needed; we just had to invest a little bit of our time. We took turns making hand prints so there would be baby turkeys and mom & dad turkeys. The rest of our decorations were free. We placed leaves and pine cones with the table runner to add a little extra something.

This is a craft for older kids. You need to be able to work a glue gun. You also will need some pipe cleaners, googly eyes, felt, and a pine cone.

My last project is not really a Thanksgiving craft, just a fun fall decoration. I made these pumpkins recently for a craft day I had with my mom and sister. They were so much fun to make, and I love how they turned out! You can find the tutorial here at Creations by Kara. I made sure to find some books with scripture verses so you could spend time reading them too. It's a great conversation piece at the dinner table!

"Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus." 1 Thessalonians 5:18