The holiday season brings warmth, excitement, and joy as families celebrate. This time of year is full of wonder and anticipation for young children. Alongside the festivities, the season offers an excellent opportunity to nurture children’s creativity and support their development through fun and meaningful activities. At ABC Ault Child Development Center, we believe in creating experiences that foster the growth of happy, healthy, and engaged children. This Thanksgiving season, we share some delightful activities families can enjoy together, making memories while supporting essential developmental skills.

Personalized Placemats for the Thanksgiving Table

While young children may be too small to help with cooking, they can still contribute to the holiday table by making personalized placemats. Children can create unique placemats that reflect their artistic expression with some construction paper, crayons, and stickers. Encourage them to draw images related to Thanksgiving, like pumpkins, leaves, or even pictures of their family.

This activity engages children and builds fine motor skills as they draw, color, and place decorations. Allowing children to contribute this way can boost their self-esteem as they see their work being used at the family table, making them feel proud of their creative contribution to the holiday meal.

Thanksgiving Rock and Flower Pot Painting

Another enjoyable and creative Thanksgiving activity is painting rocks or small flower pots. You only need some smooth stones, clay pots, and washable paints. Children can decorate the rocks with holiday-themed colors or patterns and create designs that reflect the Thanksgiving season.

Encourage children to let their imagination roam as they select colors, patterns, or characters they want to represent. This activity supports sensory development, encourages fine motor skills, and lets kids embrace their artistic side. Painted rocks can be used as decorations around the house, while painted flower pots can hold small flowers or plants as part of the Thanksgiving décor.

Creating Handprint Turkeys: A Thanksgiving Classic

Creating handprint turkeys is a nostalgic craft activity that many parents will remember from their childhoods. To make handprint turkeys, trace your child’s hand onto a paper plate or a piece of paper. Once traced, have your child transform the handprint into a turkey by adding a beak, eyes, feathers, and other decorations they like.

This activity is excellent for tracking children’s growth over the years, as you can save each year’s handprint and watch their skills and hand size grow over time. Handprint turkeys are easy and accessible, promoting creativity, hand-eye coordination, and the development of motor skills. Each turkey will be a cherished memory to look back on for years to come.

DIY Thanksgiving Decorations: Streamers, Garlands, and More

Get your child involved in creating festive Thanksgiving decorations for the whole house! Using simple materials like colored paper, string, glue, and scissors, kids can develop streamers, garlands, and other festive items. For example, they could make a chain garland out of strips of paper in fall colors or cut out paper leaves to create a garland that can be hung across the room.

Letting children make decorations that you proudly display fosters a sense of accomplishment and encourages their imaginative skills. This type of crafting also helps children learn how to work with different materials, enhancing their fine motor skills and ability to visualize and bring a project to completion.

Thanksgiving-Themed Sensory Bins

Sensory bins are a fun and hands-on way to engage children, especially during the holiday season. Create a Thanksgiving-themed sensory bin by filling a large container with items like dried corn kernels, acorns, mini pumpkins, pinecones, and small toy turkeys or pilgrims. You could also add spoons, small cups, and scoops to encourage children to explore, measure, and pour.

This activity supports sensory development, fine motor skills, and cognitive exploration. Children will enjoy the tactile experience and the opportunity to engage in open-ended play, which helps build their problem-solving skills and creativity.

Thankful Tree Craft

Teaching gratitude is a beautiful part of Thanksgiving, and the “Thankful Tree” craft is a simple and meaningful way to practice it. Begin by drawing or cutting out a large tree trunk on construction paper and attaching it to a wall or bulletin board. Then, cut out leaves from colored paper. Each day leading up to Thanksgiving, ask your child to write or dictate something they are thankful for on a leaf, then attach it to the tree.

This activity encourages children to reflect on what they are grateful for, a valuable practice in emotional development. It also provides them with a visual representation of gratitude, helping them appreciate their big and small joys. The Thankful Tree can be saved as a keepsake or recreated yearly as a family tradition.

Family Recipe Sharing and Storytelling

Thanksgiving often brings with it cherished family recipes passed down through generations. Involve your child in the holiday kitchen by inviting them to help with simple tasks like stirring, measuring, or mixing ingredients. As you prepare the dish, share stories about the recipe, where it came from, and why it’s unique to the family.

This activity connects children to their family’s heritage and the significance of family traditions. Through hands-on participation, they develop motor skills, while hearing stories fosters listening skills and a sense of belonging within the family’s history.

Creating Nature Collages with Fall Finds

Fall is a beautiful season filled with natural materials like colorful leaves, acorns, pinecones, and branches. Take your child on a nature walk to gather some of these items, then bring them home to create a Thanksgiving-themed nature collage. With some glue and a piece of paper or cardboard, they can arrange and glue the items to create their unique nature-inspired artwork.

This activity is perfect for enhancing observational skills as children learn to recognize different shapes, textures, and colors in nature. It also supports creativity and fine motor skills as they assemble their collages, making it a fun and educational activity.

Simple Paper Bag Puppets

Transform simple paper bags into Thanksgiving-themed puppets. Kids can decorate the bags as turkeys, pilgrims, or other festive characters. With crayons, markers, and some additional materials like googly eyes or colorful paper for feathers, children can design their characters to play with.

Paper bag puppets promote creativity, imaginative play, and social skills, especially if you encourage children to use their puppets in a family storytelling session. Children can explore their creativity and build language and communication skills through puppet play.

Homemade Fall Scented Playdough

Making fall-scented playdough is a sensory-rich activity that children will love. You can create playdough at home by adding scents like cinnamon, nutmeg, or pumpkin spice, bringing the comforting scents of the season to their hands-on play. Allow children to mold, squeeze, and shape the playdough into pumpkins, leaves, or other fall-inspired shapes.

Playdough is fantastic for building hand strength and fine motor skills, and the added scents make it a full sensory experience. This activity also encourages creative play and helps children develop their imagination.

Happy Holidays from ABC Ault Child Development Center

ABC Ault Child Development Center is committed to developing children in a safe, supportive, and stimulating environment. These Thanksgiving activities are just a few examples of how we believe in engaging children through creative, hands-on experiences that foster essential developmental skills. We’re delighted to offer a mid-year enrollment period, allowing families to join our community and provide their children a space to grow, learn, and explore.

If you’re looking for a nurturing space that encourages your child’s curiosity, creativity, and growth, we invite you to visit our website to learn more about our programs and services. Together, we can make every holiday season—and every day—a time for celebration, learning, and connection. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at ABC Ault Child Development Center!

For more information about our programs, visit ABC Ault Child Development Center.