Tutorial: Thanksgiving Placemats

We're hosting Thanksgiving dinner at our house this week, so I decided that it would be fun for Gretchen to make us some Thanksgiving placemats. Last week I let her choose one color of construction paper and she colored all over it. Then, I traced her hand. I cut out five handprints.

Above you can see the supplies that we used. I made turkeys out of her handprints that we made a few nights before. On brown construction paper, I drew a peanut shape and cut those out. Gretchen attached one peanut shape to one hand- her hand served as the turkey feathers. I also printed out Thanksgiving clip-art (stickers would work too), and thanks to the die cut machine at work, I cut out leaves and turkeys.

Gretchen was given a large piece of brown construction paper. I let her choose which clip art she wanted to add. She also added her hand print turkey, a leaf, and another turkey die cut.

She had lots of fun putting these together! To keep it fairly mess free, I placed the glue on the back of the picture.

And, these are the finished placemats! I'm going to take them to work this week and laminate each of them. I figured that my in-laws could take theirs home, or if it does get messy, that we can just toss them!

These placemats were a great activity to teach her about Thanksgiving, and to give her something hands on to do while I cooked dinner!