Thanksgiving Activity: {Create) a Family Journal

This is the perfect time of the year to work with your kids to create a family Thanksgiving journal. A Thanksgiving activity such as this one can bring the family together!

Here at the Kids Activities Blog we have been sharing fun family Thanksgiving activities and hope you have enjoyed creating new memories together.

Family Thanksgiving Journal

What’s the essence of Thanksgiving in your family? Looking in from the outside – from the UK, where we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving as such – there are two things I’d love to borrow from the celebration to share with my own children.

The first is the sentiment of gratitude, of stopping to appreciate all you have and giving thanks. The second is the idea of the whole family coming together to be part of something special.

Inspired by these two ideas, here’s what we’re doing to mark Thanksgiving in our family. It’s a whole family project, with everyone joining together in the thanksgiving activity to make a Thanksgiving Family Journal.

Supplies You Need To Make A Family Thanksgiving Journal

Materials:

• Hardcover Journal

Optional:

• Scissors
• Construction Paper
• Stamps
• Paint

How To Make A Family Thanksgiving Journal

We’re taking a simple notebook and turning it into both a work of art and a journal that we can use all year round to record what’s special to us.

Step one is to decorate the cover of our Thanksgiving Family Journal and I’m putting the children in charge of this and seeing what they come up with. Some ideas you could try, if you want to make a journal too:

• create some handprint art on a big piece of paper, and use that to wrap around the cover of your book. Everyone in the family could join in and you could capture handprints for several generations, of all ages and sizes. Quite a family heirloom!
• draw some portraits on the cover. Everyone could draw a self portrait, or you could all pick someone else in the family and draw them.
• make a collage using photos of the family. Go through your pictures from the previous year and pick out special events, or a photo from each month, and use them together to cover your family journal.

What to include in your Family Thanksgiving Journal

We’re going to fill our family gratitude journal with contributions from everyone. However old or young, every member of the family can join in – writing entries, dictating their ideas to someone who can write for them, or drawing sketches.

Sign The Thanksgiving Journal

We’ll start on Thanksgiving and ask everyone to sign our journal with a message of gratitude, sharing what they are thankful for right now. They might be big things or simple ones. They might be appreciation for events or other people.

Be Thankful Year Round

But Thanksgiving shouldn’t be a once-a-year-only event, should it? The practice of being grateful and appreciating what you have are things I like to encourage my children – and myself – to keep in mind all year round.

So, we’ll keep our Thanksgiving Gratitude Journal close to hand and keep adding entries over the coming months, building up a journal we can use next year, to look back and remember all the things we’ve enjoyed throughout the year.

How do you encourage your children to give thanks?

More Thanksgiving Activities

Isn’t this family journal Thanksgiving activity a fun way to create new memories with your kids? We hope you’ve been inspired! Below you will find more ideas like this here on the Kids Activities Blog:

• A fun variety of  Thanksgiving Craft Ideas.
• Thanksgiving Activity to create a Thanksgiving Tree.
• Traveling Family Journal gift idea!