{ The Thankful Tree }

I was super impressed with this craft idea that Heather came up with. We’ve done several tree crafts recently (including my favorite found here) and I decided to mix it up a bit for this one. I traced her hands onto white cardstock first and then let her paint it. You could easily use brown construction paper instead, but there wasn’t a whole lot for her to do on this craft, so she painted. While she did that, I used a scrap printout of fall leaves that I made the other day to cut out tracers for the leaves. Instead of cutting out leaves a billion times, I just combined all of the colored construction paper and folded it a few times, then cut out each leaf once. Easy peasy!

Lorelai finished with her painting by then and I set it aside to dry. (Note: if your kid likes to use a ton of paint like Lore, let it dry on a wire cookie rack instead of on another piece of cardstock – the fingers were super hard to get up and one actually ripped.) I explained “thankfulness” to her the best I could, and we wrote down things for which we were thankful. The first thing she said was ‘Daddy!’, then ‘Mommy’, and then ‘Dexter’… our little family!

We plan to add a couple more leaves each day until thanksgiving. I probably should have made a bigger tree. =P

The pictures are complete crap, I know. We have no natural lighting in the kitchen/dining room and my big flash is missing. Doesn’t help that it’s super cloudy outside and rainy. I hate doing crafts at the kitchen table – lol.

Want another good craft for the month of November? Check out this Harvest Corn Craft we did a few weeks ago.