​Family Thanksgiving Activities

If you're hosting a family thanksgiving, you want to create a fun family environment that helps children understand the importance of thankfulness and reminds the adults of  this as well.  

Since Thanksgiving comes just before what many refer to as the "greedy" season, activities designed to remind people of the bounty in their lives are useful. For example, you might help children understand that while they don't have everything they want, they do have everything they need.  

How do you do this? Several ways. One is to help children create a cornucopia, which will sit on the Thanksgiving table. There are a variety of ways to do this. You can make a papier-mâché cornucopia using a balloon as the base to help you get the shape started. You can simply take large piece of poster board and shape them into a cone and fill those with whatever you like. As an extra activity, you can have the children decorate the cornucopia before it gets filled.

Since the idea of the cornucopia is to celebrate a bounty and appreciate that bounty, you can fill it as is traditionally done with squash, corn and the like. You might also ask each member of the family to bring something that represents their personal bounty in life. A new mom might bring a baby blanket to put in the cornucopia while a newly retired grandpa might add a picture of his family, since that's what's most important to him. You can discuss the items in the cornucopia basket at the dinner table while enjoying your Thanksgiving feast.

Another family activity that kids like is the thankfulness jar. When each person arrives at dinner, they place a note with something they are thankful for in the jar. Ideally, each person will add more than one item to the jar. At dinner, someone (ideally, the matriarch of patriarch of the family) reads the notes. Everyone tries to figure out who wrote which note. The items can range from the serious (someone who struggled with an illness in the previous year might be thankful for life, quite simply) to the silly (the new mom might be thankful there's a Starbucks within 5 minutes of her home). Kids enjoy adding their own touches to the thankfulness jar and their responses are often a surprise to the adult family members.

Some families have several tables set about at Thanksgiving. Many people buy professional floral arrangements to decorate the tables. You can make a game out of it to figure out who's going to get to bring home the table arrangement to their home. You can do the old wedding thing and simply put a number on the bottom of the centerpiece and have someone's chair match that number or you can make a game and perhaps create a trivia game out of Thanksgiving facts. For example, questions might look like this:
*How many turkeys are cooked on Thanksgiving throughout the US?
*Why are turkeys called turkeys?
*Which president set aside the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving?

Be sure you research and know the answers and then quiz everyone. This is a great way to pass the time while everyone is waiting for the feast to be ready. Just tell the winners they can't take the centerpieces until dinner is over!
You can have a similar game before dessert. Create a family trivia game and quiz family members before dessert. Only the people who get the answers right get to have their dessert. Everyone else has to keep trying until they get their trivia question right. Questions can range from the silly to the sublime. They might look something like this:
*Who got popcorn stuck in her braces at 12?
*Which man here wore boots with big holes in them until he was 20 and could buy his own?
*Whose grandparents immigrated to the US from Ireland?
*Which boy here got suspended from school for riding his bike into the classroom?

I am a homeschooling work from home mom. I am teaching my two children Kindergarten and 1st grade. Including 4 subjects Math, Ready, Science and social studies everyday I also teach them weekly vocabulary/ spelling words and a book of the week. We read and discuss daily every week. In addition to those duties I also cook, serve and clean all meals. I come up with projects for fun and education. I set up and clean up art projects. After all that and more I also handle most household bills, shopping, budgeting, taxes and most anything else. I also handle research and paperwork for our Farm and rental property. In addition to that I have written, illustrated and published a children's book. I have also written 3 more for the series I am working on writing and illustrations when I find the time. All this and some more I have going on is why I have not had time to blog. But blogging is something I truly do enjoy. I love to write. It gives me great joy to put words to paper and share them. I work so hard on so many avenues in my life so I can live the life I want so I can be free from a boss and be happy. I enjoy how I spend my days with my kids cooking and writing and managing our land and businesses. If I don’t enjoy something I don’t invest in it and what I do enjoy I have invested in. I have also forgotten things like taking time to write for the pure joy of it not to publish or to make money from a sponsor but to just put something out that I am proud of something that might make someone else happy or more aware of a resource available to them. One of my favorite pieces I ever wrote I didn’t make a cent for and it was titled something like ‘how to start a business with little to no cash’ I shared a list of website resources that offered free services. On the other hand at the height of my online writing for money faze the thing I think paid the most per word was a deodorant endorsement. Far from something that would make you feel like a real writer. I lost the passion for writing after about a year of making good money but not having any topics to write about that fueled my passion. When I stated my blog I simply wrote about what interested me or things I had learned. I loved it and the articles showed that passion. I cheated myself when I started writing articles from sponsors and I cheated my followers and it showed! I really want to write again and I don’t know what subject will come to the top but I am gonna put my heart out there. I will only take a sponsor if it’s something I already like and I hope to share my  wonderful life and my wonderful family. My hope is by getting to know us you learn a little something and smile a lot more! Thanks if you have read this far;)  your one of the rare ones.

​Written by Me : Ashley Crossman 

P.S. If you are still getting these in email I will soon be sending out a digital gift from my latest book :)