Thankful Turkeys: A Meaningful (& Easy) Thanksgiving Craft

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I love crafting with a purpose.

These “Thankful Turkeys” as I’ve named them not only got my kids cutting, gluing and using their creative skills but they also gave us an excuse to articulate some things we are thankful for. Doing this craft together stirred up conversation about why we celebrate Thanksgiving and helped all of us to practice being grateful.

Not sure if I’ll be able to pull this off but I’d love to do one of these each year. It’d be so fun to keep a record of what my kids are thankful for each year. I imagine they would provide a lot of laughs and memories if kept over the decades.

Ready to make your own?

How to Make Thankful Turkeys

Materials Needed:

• Brown paper bag
• Scissors
• Glue
• Colored construction paper
• Plastic eyes

Start by cutting the bottom third off of your brown paper bag.

Fold the larger portion of your brown bag in half. Press it firmly down to make a solid seam.

Cut out your feathers. These don’t have to be perfect at all. In fact, a little imperfection makes them even cuter in my opinion. I stacked my construction paper up and just cut them all at once by just eyeballing what looked like a good feather size to glue on the back of the bag.

Now, glue your feathers on to the back side of your bag. Try to fan them out a bit so they look like turkey feathers from the front.

More importantly, if you have toddlers, try to remind yourself that a messy glue job isn’t going to hurt anyone or ruin the craft. Let them have fun with it. 🙂

After feathers have been glued onto the back and given a chance to dry a bit, flip your bag over and start working on your turkey face.

Put your eyeballs first.

Cut a small triangle out of the orange construction paper. This will be the turkey nose. Glue that on right under the eyes. 

Again, this doesn’t have to be perfect.

Lastly, add a snood. A snood is the red thing that hangs off of a turkey’s beak. And yes, I had to google what it was actually called if you really needed to know.

Now the fun part. Open up your turkey and start brainstorming things that you are thankful for. When doing this with my 2 & 4 year old, I made it a point to write down whatever they said without any questions. I had to coach my 2 year old along a bit but my four year old was totally digging the game.

It was pretty cute to hear them work on these together. They often wanted to copy each other but I only let them do that when they both wanted to say, “Jesus.” OK, twist my arm. You can both be thankful for Jesus. #pastorkidproblems

Lastly, I think it’s worth noting that crafting with kids gives you some perfectly imperfect results. While my knee-jerk tendency is to tell them exactly how to do the craft in order for it to look cute, I have to remind myself to let them learn and create on their own.

Usually, the end results actually turn out cuter than the original idea. My two year old’s feathers were, um, original… The nose is crooked and there is for sure three times as much glue than was necessary for the craft. But, I love it.

Like I said, it’s perfectly imperfect.

Happy crafting!