The Thankfullness Tree

With Thanksgiving 3 weeks away, the "season" of thankfulness is once again upon us (even though we are of course thankful for the Lord's blessings all year round). Like a lot of moms, I decided to get my kids in the spirit of feeling thankful with a craft project. After searching around for a fun project that everyone could participate in, (including DAD) we decided to make a "thankfulness tree".

Now, the traditional way to complete this project is to use a paper bag to piece the tree trunk together, or to use markers to draw the trunk on a large piece of paper. Doing it that way is a lot of fun and requires glue or tape to adhere the trunk to the backing paper or markers for drawing. Since I am a graphic designer, my kids and I decided to go high tech and use a graphic that I had made in Adobe Illustrator (mostly because we did not have a large enough backing paper on hand and wanted it to be pretty big). First, we printed the tree out (utilizing the tile pages function in Illustrator). The tree took up 30 pieces of paper (being 5 feet tall). The kids had a blast piecing it together like a huge puzzle. After much teamwork and lots of tape, we were finally done with the tree. The kids eyes shone bright as we hung it up on the wall. Next, we printed and cut out leaves of various sizes (also made in illustrator). Leaves can also be made of construction paper or any other media that can be written on. When the leaves were all cut out, each member of our family took 4 leaves and wrote an item that they were thankful for on them. We used permanent markers, but any writing utensil will do (the darker mark it makes the better). Some examples of the things we came up with were:

• God's love
  
• Dollies
• Food
• Our Home
  
• Being able to help
• God's Forgiveness
• The USA
• Our Family
• The Wii
  
• Friends and Fun
• A Bed
  

After everyone completed their leaves, we all took turns reading them out loud and placing them on the tree (we used tape but glue works just as well). We also printed and placed some pumpkins we had carved (online at http://www.cubpack81.com/images/carve_pumpkin.swf) at the base of the tree. The finishing touch was to draw in some grass. Because God is so good, I know that we will be coming up with many more things to be thankful for, so we printed and cut some extra leaves to place on the tree as the month goes on. When guests come over, we will invite them to place a leaf on the tree as well. It will be fun to see all the leaves when Thanksgiving rolls around!

I thought it would be fun to share "thankfulness" projects that other moms are doing with their kids on this blog, so feel free to leave a comment in response to the following question:

What type of fun activities, games, or projects are you doing with your kids this season in order to build up a spirit of thankfulness in your home?