How we Made our "Thankful Tree" (a Thanksgiving Tradition of ours)

One of our Thanksgiving traditions we started is to do a "Thankful Tree." It is such a fun project to do as a family and it makes for a striking decoration as well! 

Last year, I bought a premade kit to do this, and we did it during our Wednesday night preschool/kindergarten Bible study group. My kids loved it so much that I thought I'd just do one for us as a family this year. 

It's pretty simple, actually. All I needed was construction paper, leaf shaped cookie cutters (optional, but that's what I used to trace the leaf shapes), tape, markers, and a huge piece of brown paper. 

The idea to do this at home came to me when I brought home a large piece of brown paper from the paper rolls at school. We had an extra piece from a project and the edges were pretty gnarled, so I just took it home with me. You can use regular brown construction paper for sure and just tape multiple pieces together. Or, maybe us a large piece of brown cardboard... 

The first thing I did was cut out a vague tree shape from the brown paper and attach it to our front door. I just did it freehand since I knew most of the branches would be covered by the leaves. 

Next, I took several pieces of fall-colored construction paper and stuck them all together with a binder clip on each side. I think I had 8 sheets... red, orange, yellow, and green. I traced some of my cookie cutters to get the leaf shapes right. We did a maple leaf, oak leaf, and elm leaf because our Thankful tree is MAGICAL and has multiple shapes and colors of leaves all on the same tree. Since all of my pages were clipped together, I saved a lot of time by just cutting out all the leaves at once. 

Then I spread them out on the table so we could all look at them and pick which color and shape we wanted to write on. 

Since Froot Loop is doing very well with his writing, I got brave and handed him a permanent marker with explicit instructions to ONLY WRITE ON THE LEAF PAPER! 

And off he went! He had a lot of fun thinking of things he was thankful for and writing them down. He needed a little help with spelling, but that's what Mamas are for, right? 

For Cocoa Puff, I wrote on his leaves for him. He came up with some awesome things he is thankful for! 

Froot Loop put a lot of thought into most of his leaves. 

Both of the boys had to have their items approved by Mama because I really didn't want to put things like "toilets" and every single cartoon character they know on the tree. Mama held the power of veto, but I only had to use it a couple of times. 

When we were done writing, we had a nice pile of leaves of things we are thankful for! 

Then, we got to work taping our leaves onto our tree! I let Froot Loop do a few to start. 

Then Cocoa Puff got to do a few as well. 

Froot Loop was REALLY into putting the leaves on and he had a lot of fun reading each leaf and attaching it to the tree. Cocoa Puff wandered off after he did a few of them. 

I'm going to show off a few of the leaves we came up with... enjoy, and try not to laugh too much at some of them! 

I am SOOOO Happy with how our Thankful tree turned out. I am very proud of the boys for some of the things they came up with, and got a good laugh at some of them too. I also love how it's on our front door so we will see it every time we come and go from the house. It's such a nice way to remember that THANKSgiving is more than just football, a day off of work, and overeating. 

What are some things YOU are thankful for?