Thanksgiving Printables

We've had fun this week making turkey-shaped foods and doing turkey-themed activities.  And now, "turkey day" is finally upon us.  Tomorrow we will gather with family/friends, eating good food and remembering that there is so much for which we are thankful. No matter what your Thanksgiving plans are--whether the festivities are great big or very small, whether you are staying at your house or headed to family or friends, whether you are hosting or will be a guest, having these cute printables might be the perfect addition to your festivities...

First off, how about using these cute little messages as place cards or just sitting on each plate?

They're found here at Crafts and Sutch and she gives you the directions on how to print.  

Do you find that you have extra pie and want to send some home with others...or maybe you want to take a slice of favorite pie home with you? Well, why not do so in a cute little pie box?

 Cute huh?!  You can head over to Love the Day to download the printable & make your pie box(es).  


The next two ideas give people a little something fun to do while waiting around for the feast to start--or maybe while digesting a little before dessert!  
The band geek in me LOVES this (yes, I'm a proud former marching band member from high school & all through college. Go Big Red!)! Not to mention, Mad-Lib type activities are always a good time!  You can download it here from Family Fun.

And, the teacher & competitor in me loves this trivia idea too.  How fun would it be to compete for the first piece of favorite dessert...a special individual treat...or maybe even a little family "turkey trophy"?!  You can stop by Pretty Parties to download the file and get the answers.

 No matter what your plans tomorrow, I hope you have a very Happy Thanksgiving! On this day, and always, thank you for stopping by Mom Endeavors!

Turkey Fruit Snacks!

Betcha didn't think there were such a thing as turkey fruit snacks (yah, I didn't either)...but, we did indeed have them for snack.  See?!

Since the turkey sandwich was such a big hit with Big Brother, I wanted to do something similar today for snack while I watched the kiddos (I watch a friend's kids a couple of times a week).  

To make your vegetarian turkeys, you'll need:

   -an apple (or more depending on how many you're making)

   -fruit leather or fruit rollup

   -cheese

   -sprinkles or edible ink pen

   -peanut butter, cream cheese, or frosting (to hold everything together)

   -a knife

Directions:

- For the body of the turkey, cut the round sides off of a washed apple, like this:

- Use the apple flesh to cut oblong-type shapes for the head/neck and attach to the body using your desired spread of choice
- From the fruit leather/rollup, cut feathers.  I was able to get 5 per fruit leather, like this:

- Cut small triangles from cheese for the beak and attach using spread of choice.
- Place the sprinkles for eyes & wattle (those happen to be red car sprinkles)
- And....voila, turkey fruit snacks!  

 

A fun snack for the week or a perfect healthy turkey treat for the kids' Thanksgiving table! 

Make a Felt Board and...

...a fun felt turkey to go with!

Yay!  I'm so excited that we're all feeling better and have had some time to get in a few of the terrific Thanksgiving activities I wanted to do.

I decided on this felt project first because I had made Big Brother a "build a jack-o-lantern" felt activity for Halloween and thought we could really use a felt board.  If you have preschool age little ones and don't have one, it was the easiest thing to make and has SO many applications!  

I used a piece of foam board and some left over felt that I had from other projects.  

  

Just cut your foam board to whatever size you'd like (or leave it big).  I opted to cut it down a bit smaller (ours is just slightly bigger than half the foam board)--making it large enough to do scenes on, but small enough that Big Brother could manage it. 

Lay your cut board on the felt and then hot glue the edges down on the back--pulling the felt as tight as you can.  Unfortunately, mine had creases in it (which I tried unsuccessfully to get it).  But, it makes no difference to the 3-year old! :)  And, for very little cost, we have versatile felt board to do all kinds of activities on.

Now, for the turkey:

The inspiration for this fun guy came from Naptime Crafting and the best part is, she shared a template.  So, using the template here, I was able to complete the whole project (board and all) in under an hour!

I glued the pieces of the body together (including body, head/neck, feet) but did not glue those to the board.  So, the turkey is one piece that Big Brother can place anywhere on the board.  Then, he can do activities with the feathers. He so loved getting his turkey bird all arranged:

 I love that there are so many learning applications with just a simple thing like this--counting, sorting, colors, sizes (there are two different sizes of feathers), matching games, patterning, etc. 

Now, my mind is swimming with all kinds of fun Christmas themed felt activities to make, so stay tuned!  

Thanksgiving Themed Muffin Tin Meal

We kicked off Thanksgiving week with a little themed muffin tin meal tonight.  

As usual, Big Brother loved it! It was a rather blustery day around here and I was making chicken soup and sandwiches for dinner.  So, I thought this would make Big Brother have a little more fun with with it.

Here's what dinner included (starting top left, continuing clockwise):

-cheese pumpkins & pumpkin pretzels, a turkey sandwich, craisins, triscuits, chicken soup, and a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie.

The star of the meal was of course Mr. Turkey Sandwich...

To make: cut two slices of bread into a large circle for the body.  With the scraps, cut an oblong shape for the head.  Make a sandwich of your choice with the large circles.  Then, using butter, attach the head to the body.  Make eyes (I carved them from black olives), a beak (cut triangle of cheese stuck on with a little butter), and a wattle (I cut up the pimento out of a green olive).
For the feathers, cut three baby carrots into thin slices (I got 3-4 from each carrot) and stick in the middle of the sandwich.  One pretzel stick cut in half will give you the legs! 


A fun start to Thanksgiving week in which there are sure to be some more terrific turkey activities completed!  Thinking that serving up leftover Thanksgiving foods like this and  making these with leftover turkey would be pretty cute too!!


*You can always finds LOADS of great muffin tin meal inspiration at the Muffin Tin Mom.

Terrific Turkeys!

How is Thanksgiving only a week away?  

I'm sad to report that other than our two fall leaves activities we've done nothing Thanksgiving related around here yet.  A rather unpleasant stomach bug has been sweeping through our house over the past week and has rendered us rather "activity-less".  No surprise though, there are some great ideas out there that I would love to try.  
First off, if only I had a girl...

Check out the adorable dress made using this fleecy bird at Living My Life on Purpose!
Since there is no girl in the house though, I'll stop daydreaming and we'll stick to more "neutral" ideas...
I know Big Brother would especially like all these terrific turkey ideas:

This gratitude turkey from Parents is a great concept (similar to some of the gratitude leaf/tree ideas).  It looks easy to make and something that the kiddos would really enjoy.

Naptime Crafting shared this cute felt turkey and includes a template for it! I'm hoping this might be one we manage to complete!  It reminds me of the "build a jack-o-lantern" we made for Halloween. I think it would be really fun to do these sorts of felt activities for the different holidays/seasons as they are not only inexpensive & easy to make, but so easy adapted for a variety of learning activities.

And, talk about inexpensive, but cute--A Glimpse Inside's toilet paper roll turkey is something the little ones would have fun helping with too! 

And, while there are tons of other simple & cute turkey activities out there, I wanted to highlight some gobblicious turkey treats too...

Let's start with the perfect kid-friendly Thanksgiving morning breakfast treats:

Seriously, how cute are those?! 

Little Nummies whipped up those adorable banana gobble pancakes and the cinnamon rolls are the clever creation of FishMama at Life as Mom-- a Thanksgiving tradition at her house and she even has a healthier version too! 

And, now, for two things significantly less healthy...

Handprint Turkey Cookies from Bee in our Bonnet

Genius and adorable!! 

Oreo Turkeys from Our Best Bites

Awesome!  And look, they made one just for me! (I wish!) 

And, last, but definitely not least, if we are talking adorable treats then you must check out Bakerella. Her turkeys are practically too cute to eat!  

And, did you know that Bakerella just recently released her book, Cake Pops?! 

Right now, you can order it here on Amazon for half-price at only $9.99!! What a great Christmas present that would make!! 

What Turkey crafts and treats do you like to make?

Fabulous Fall Leaves...

We kicked off November with a fall leaves activity & fun leaf theme lunch...

And although I had big plans for other things, somehow, Thanksgiving is already next week and then the Christmas decorating begins.  So, some of these fun leaf activities will clearly have to wait until next year, but they are so fabulous that I wanted to log them here to remember!

First off, I so wish I would have seen these totally awesome tortilla chip leaves at Delia Creates before we made our leaf theme lunch!  Though, I think they would also make a perfect Thanksgiving appetizer! 

Creating Cupcakes made this cute fall garland and offers a really cute leaf template that could be used in all sorts of ways! 

Simply Modern Mom has another really cute & simple leaf garland that also incorporates a theme of gratitude.  

 

Keeping with the gratitude theme, Crafts by Amanda made this Thanksgiving Tree craft with kids' handprints!  I have a thing for handprint crafts! 

And, here is my favorite--My Insanity's Gratitude Tree. Not only do I love the concept, but I find this one especially fun because that layout looks exactly like my house (except our banister is white)--even the wall color!  So, it's the perfect preview of what it would look like here!  

See--fabulous, right?!

What kind of fall crafts do you like to do?

Leaf Theme Lunch

To go along with our fall leaf theme this past week, I made Big Brother a leaf/tree themed muffin tin lunch! 

Included (starting top left going clockwise) were leaf shape pickles, a leaf shaped sandwich, salad leaves, little broken tree branches (as Big Brother called them), leaf shaped pears, and ants (raisins) on fallen tree logs. 

Big Brother was quite excited by all of it and loved telling me what everything was (like the little broken branches)...until we got to the "ants on a log".  He wasn't sure what it was so when I told him it was "ants on a long", he said, "oh no Mommy, I don't want to eat ants".  LOL!  Too funny.  After I explained they were just pretend ants and are really raisins, that's what he ate first! 

I really enjoy coming up with these theme lunches as it is really an exercise in creativity for me trying to come up with foods that fit the theme or foods that I can "shape" to fit it. In this one, I was most pleased with the pear leaves!  To do it, I just cut the pear into sections (like with an apple). Then, cut the wedges into leaf shapes and made some slices in the skin to resemble leaves.  Simple and effective! 

As always, for more muffin tin meal ideas, head over to Muffin Tin Mom.

Fall Leaves

I LOVE fall!  The temperature change, the college football, the anticipation of favorite holidays, and (when I attended college in the midwest)...the leaves and pretty colors!  

That's Big Brother (at 7 months) on a fall visit back to our college campus (that's where my husband and I met.  Yes, we're college sweethearts).  I love these types of fall scenes! 
Unfortunately though, we don't really get that classic fall look where we live now.  Sure, a few of the trees change and drop leaves.  But, it's a small few, so we don't get the pretty array of colors and due to the temperature (hello, it was 90 here this week!!), the changes don't usually happen until the end of this month or closer to Christmas! 

So, when you can't have this...

(aren't those colors so gorgeous?!  that fantastic photo was taken in the town I went to college in by my freshman year college roommate!)

then you have to make these...

Close right?!  Ok, so maybe not, but still a fun fall activity to do with the kiddos!  For this leaf project, I downloaded a free maple leaf template from first-school along with an "L is for leaf" page for them to do.  To make our fall leaves, we used the same Crayola fingerpaints and paper as we did to make our abstract pumpkin art.  

As we discovered with our pumpkins, the colors don't bleed together the same way traditional fingerpaints do.  So, we were left with some very fall-like leaves!

If you don't have the special Crayola fingerpaints and don't feel like buying any of those (we just happened to have them), then you could try making them with light corn syrup and food coloring as Alison from Oopsey Daisy shared on Ucreate with Kids.  

See?!  I think those turn out totally awesome and might just have to be our next leaf making project!  And, at least with these fun hand-painted leaves, there are no big dead piles to rake up!! :)

What's your favorite leaf activity to make with the kids?