Gratitude Craft for Kids: Creating Your Own Thankful Trees

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Want to help develop thankfulness in your children? Here is a fun gratitude craft that your kids will love!

Tutorial on how to make thankful trees that you can keep with your child’s handprint and arm.

gratitude craft for kids - thankful trees - paint tray

This year I wanted to have a thankful tree and for some reason, I couldn’t just have a prettied-up mason jar with some twigs in it. Nope. I tried to keep it simple. I really did. But the crafter inside me wanted to come out (doesn’t that sound freaky!). I made a super fun Pinterest board of Thankful Trees, and while they were fun and great, I wanted to do something different. Honestly, just call me crazy. It’s okay. I have three children under the age of five, a dog, I’m pregnant, and I *needed* to pull out all the craft supplies for some Thankful Trees.

But you know what? I’m glad I did. The kids LOVED this project. And now I have a keepsake of their little arms. So sweet!

Thankful Trees | Gratitude Craft For Kids

Items you need for Thankful Trees

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8×10 canvas
Do A Dot Markers
pencil
permanent marker
an eraser

Those are the things I used. You could use regular paint and markers. I even had the baby start out with colored pencils. The possibilities are endless. This project is so simple.

The Baby Thankful Tree

1. Every person gets a canvas. This allowed them each to paint whatever they wanted however they wanted. Had I just had one canvas for them to paint, it wouldn’t have worked. Not at their ages anyway.

Step Two Thankful Trees

2. Let them dot, dot, dot. They loved the freedom in painting by themselves. I loved that there wasn’t the mess that you have with paint and paint brushes. If you’re kids are like mine, you do have to watch the little ones as they like to bite off the squishy tip of the paint marker. I don’t know if I’d call this “washable”, just FYI. My oldest son still has paint on his arms.

3. Let them dry. Because this seemed to dry pretty quickly, I was almost tempted to go ahead and move on to step four. Maybe you can. I’m glad I waited.

Step Three Thankful Trees

4. Trace their hand and arm. This was a lot easier than the handprint turkeys I tried making the year before. While my oldest son didn’t want to leave his hand on the canvas for me to take a picture, he did but it on there for me to trace. Even the 19 month old cooperated!

traced trees

5. Use the permanent marker to go over the lines from the pencil. This allows you to fix any lines where they moved or jerked their hands away.

Thankful Trees 2

6. You have a tree!

Now what?

Now that you have this great tree, what do you do with it?

At dinner time we talk about the things we are thankful for. Right now we’re just writing them on sticky notes and putting them on the big tree. But it would be pretty neat to write the things that the kids are thankful for each day on their trees. We won’t be using their hand trees next year anyway because they will have grown ::tear::. Maybe we’ll start doing that. It will be fun to pack them away and bring them out next year to see how much they have grown!

Thankful Trees

Are you doing a Thankful Tree this year? What does your thankful tree look like?

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