subject: Thanksgiving Party Favors- Games & Activities That Helps Children Understand Its Importance [print this page] If you're hosting a family thanksgiving, you want to make 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 lots of refer to as the "greedy" season, activities created 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? There are a bunch of several ways. One is to help children make a cornucopia, which will sit on the Thanksgiving table. There are a variety of ways to do this. You can make a paper-mache cornucopia using a balloon as the base to help you get the shape started. You can simply take gigantic segment 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 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 past year might be thankful for life, somewhat simply) to the silly (the new mom might be thankful there's a Starbucks within five minutes of her home). Kids enjoy adding their own touches to the thankfulness jar and their responses are frequently 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 make a trivia game out of Thanksgiving facts.
