Simple Kid’s Thanksgiving Activities

As you prepare for Thanksgiving this year, you will want a few activities to keep the kids entertained. With these easy and kid-friendly Thanksgiving activities, you’ll be able to conquer your day while keeping your children occupied. We know you’ve got cooking to do, desserts to bake, and tables to set so you’ll need some simple kid’s Thanksgiving activities so you can get it all done.

How Kids Can Help On Thanksgiving Day

The first idea that we consider is how our kids can help on Thanksgiving Day. Our kids love to cook and bake with us. While they cannot do everything, you can always find a few tasks where kids can help. As your child ages, there will be even more ways to include them in Thanksgiving preparation.

How Can Toddlers Help on Thanksgiving Day?

Your toddler has so many interests and a short attention span, but they still want to help. Your little one can help put potatoes into a bowl or dump cans into the pot, with the heat off. If you need to wash anything, they can help turn on and off the faucet if you have a stool. Many toddlers also love stirring and mixing as well.

How Can Preschool Children Help on Thanksgiving Day?

Most preschool children can help out just as they did when they were a toddler, but they are able to do so much more. They can help set the table if you are using dishes that aren’t easily broken. Depending on your cleaning supplies, they can help wipe down counters and wash fruits and vegetables.

Your preschool child may enjoy “reading” the recipe and gathering the ingredients. You can measure out the ingredients and have your child dump them into the bowl. Allow your child to mix and taste test.

Your preschooler may also love decorating for Thanksgiving too! We have a few different crafts and activities we will include below that will help to keep your child busy while you are preparing for the holiday.

What are Ways that School-Age Children Can Help with Thanksgiving?

Once your child reaches kindergarten, they really can start helping with so much. Kindergarten children can start using a butter knife to spread and cut soft foods. They are also beginning to read and may enjoy reading you the recipe. Slicing jellied cranberry sauce, breads, or potatoes are great ways for your child to help.

Usually around 7 or 8, children can start successfully measuring out ingredients. When you first start allowing your child to measure out the ingredients, start with flour or sugar since these are cheaper and often need larger quantifies. Be sure to double check your child’s measurements and work with them to better understand the different types of measuring quantities.

Usually around 10, your child can start to use the oven and stove. Many children are successful at cooking and baking around 5th grade. Be sure to monitor your child when they are using an open flame or the oven. Children can stir sauces, gravies, and vegetables while they cook. Depending on the weight of the dish, children can help to put items in the oven, set timers, and take items out of the oven.

Thanksgiving Foods Kids Can Prepare

We love to plan for a few recipes that the children can make with little assistance from us. We can set out the ingredients and the instructions and allow our children to make a dish for Thanksgiving dinner. These are great recipes that children can make with just a little help and will occupy them while you need more time for cooking.

Turkey Pudding Cups

Our children love to make these cute desserts. Prior to beginning, make an instant chocolate pudding (or really any flavor your family enjoys). Let your children scoop the pudding into small cups. We prefer clear cups, but any color can work.

Then your children decorate the pudding cup to make it look like a turkey. We use a homemade oval shaped cookie for the turkey body, but you could also use Milani cookies. Set these into the pudding, then let your child decorate with two candy eyes, a candy corn nose, and larger red sprinkles or frosting for the gobbler. We use a bit of homemade frosting to help the eyes, nose, and gobbler stick to the cookie, but store bought frosting will work as well.

Use the multi-colored Swedish fish candy as the feathers. Your child can add them into the pudding behind the cookie to make the turkey’s feathers.

Turkey Dessert

We love to make cookies, brownies and rice krispie treats in our home. For this, we simply use circle cookie cutters or make the treats shaped like a ball or cookie.

Provide your children with mini mulit-colored Swedish Fish, candy corn, frosting, and candy eyes to decorate their turkeys while you are cooking throughout the day. We then wrap these up and display them for an after dinner dessert.

Thanksgiving Lunch

While you are so focused on cooking dinner, you may have little time for making lunch. If your children are school-age, put them in charge of lunch. They can make sandwiches with lunch meat or even peanut butter and jelly.

If you have some fresh fruit and vegetables, you could ask your children to cut up the fruit and vegetables. If your children want a turkey spin to lunch, cut the sandwiches with a circle cookie cutter. Then decorate with colorful fruit and vegetables to make eyes, nose, gobbler, and feathers.

Thanksgiving Activities to Play with Kids While You Prepare Thanksgiving Dinner

While you are cooking, baking, and cleaning, it is always a good idea to have some activities that you can do with your children. These activities do not take much time on the part of parents, but do need a little parent guidance and assistance in those in between moments.

Thanksgiving Gratitude Scavenger Hunt

Our kids love a good scavenger hunt and we hope yours will too. For our Thanksgiving scavenger hunt, we love to not only include Thanksgiving items to find, but also include some items that our kids are thankful for as well. Depending on the age of your child, you can make your scavenger hunt with words or add pictures for children who aren’t yet reading.

We like to use this when we know we will be opening the oven many times or cooking over the stove. Your kids can participate while you are cooking, just print out a sheet of items or show them one card at a time. While your children find the items, you can cook on the stovetop, transfer food to or from the oven, and take care of any other adult tasks.

Thanksgiving Pictionary for Kids

Pictionary is another great activity that you can do with your children while we are cooking. While younger kids can participate, you will need at least one child who can draw fairly well for this game to be successful. We find we have the best luck when our children are school age.

Simply write down a list of Thanksgiving words. Put the words in a jar and take turns picking out a word, drawing the item, and having the others guess what you are drawing. Our children love to do the drawing, which frees us up for guessing while cooking.

Turkey Hunt

This is one of our favorite Thanksgiving day activities for kids. We especially love this activity for our younger children. It only takes a few minutes for the parents but can keep your children entertained for 5 or more minutes each time.

You will need a stuffed turkey, paper turkey, or turkey craft. Simply hide the craft somewhere in your house and challenge your children to find the turkey. Each time your children find the turkey, you can hide it again and keep the game going as you cook.

Coloring Table

We love to buy a coloring table cloth for Thanksgiving Dinner. If you have a favorite table cloth, you could also try these coloring placemats. When your children should not be in the kitchen or you really need them out from under your feet, help them get settled at the table with a few crayons and let them color.

These are great for any time throughout the day because your child can sit down to color all throughout the day. When your child finishes coloring one area, just set them up in another chair at the table to work on the next part. There are so many different pictures and places to color that your child should have plenty to do.

Have a little one who isn’t able to sit at a table? No worries, lay out the table cloth on the floor for your littlest to color.

Thanksgiving Crafts for Kids

We love to have a few crafts to try out at Thanksgiving with our children. While we’ve included 3 crafts, there are so many hundreds more to choose from. These are our family’s favorite crafts because we love making our own decorations and handprint crafts are always a keepsake.

Easy Handprint Turkey Craft

For a handprint turkey, simply gather some paper and a few colors of paint. We love to use brown, red, green, blue, and yellow. Paint the child’s palm and thumb brown for the body. Then paint each finger a different bright color for the feathers. Press the handprint and add a red gobbler below the child’s thumb.

Paper Bag Cornucopia

The paper bag cornucopia makes a fun center piece decoration. When we are grocery shopping for Thanksgiving, just ask the cashier or bagger to use at least 1 paper bag. Simply roll the top of the bag down once or twice. Then scrunch the end of the bag to turn into a cornucopia shape.

Next, let your children fill the bag with plastic foods, real foods, foods printed on paper or hand drawn foods. We love to turn this into a healthy eating activity by asking our children to fill their cornucopia with deliciously, healthy foods.

To add even more decoration, glue a few fall leaves to the outside of the bag. We love to use real leaves, but you could also draw or print paper leaves too.

Fall Leaves Place Cards or Mats

We love to make our own seating place cards or place mats for Thanksgiving. To make seating place cards, cut out a 5in by 5in construction paper square. Then cut out at 5in by 5in piece of clear contact paper.

Choose where to write the person’s name. Some years our kids wrote them on the leaves, while other years they wrote them below or on the side of the leaf. Place a leaf on the sticky side of the contact paper, then place the construction paper over the top.

Simply fold in half and display for the name is easy to read. This is a simple craft that our children do without much help these days and makes the table look beautiful.

For Thanksgiving placemats, we use full size pieces of construction paper 12in by 18in. Then cut the contact paper to the same size. You can decorate on either the contact paper or the construction paper but we find decorating on the contact paper holds the leaves in place better for little hands.

Fun Games For Thanksgiving Day

We love to plan a few fun Thanksgiving Day games to play as a family. We like to keep these simple so that we can play in between our other tasks or while we are cooking. Plus we love spending time with our family and capturing special moments.

Kids as Photographer Game

Once your children are a little older, 3 or 4, this is such a fun game to play. We give our children an iPad, disposable camera or our phone to take pictures to document all the work and fun of Thanksgiving. As parents we often forget to take pictures outside of the family photo shoot, so this can be a really fun way to capture some real life moments.

Just challenge your children to take creative and silly photos throughout the day. You can even rotate them so they each take photos for 15 – 30 minutes at a time. After everything is cleaned up and put away, or the next day, sit down and go through the photos. Pick a few winners for some different categories.

To make the voting process a little quicker, let each child nominate one photo for each category. Then you can have a simple family or adult vote.

Thanksgiving Bingo

We love Bingo in our home and have found that this is a great Thanksgiving experience even when we cannot all be together. Zoom Bingo can be quite fun too.

To make our bingo cards, we brainstorm 24 or more words together as a family. Then we write out each word on an index card for pulling when we draw the cards. Each person writes or draws the words onto their own person bingo card. Each word can only be used once. So easy to make everyone their own card.

We love adding a twist to our bingo game. Instead of just reading the card, we have our children act out the word for the others to guess.

Racing Feathers Game

Another fun game to play is the Thanksgiving Racing Feather game. Each child lines up a feather or any other light object on the starting line. We’ve also used balloons, leaves, and wrappers. Then we use turkey basters to move the feather to the finish line. Such a simple game but so much fun and always brings lots of laughs.

We’d Love to Connect with You

Hopefully you have found some amazing ways to add some fun to your Thanksgiving celebrations this year. Of course, if you are planning to celebrate Thanksgiving or some of Thanksgiving virtually, be sure to check out our Virtual Thanksgiving post for more ideas.

Worried about making this wonderful dinner and having kids who won’t eat it? Check out our post sharing our Secret to Getting Your Kids to Eat Dinner. Don’t miss out on our Tips for Celebrating Christmas with Toddlers. Looking for ideas for New Year’s, read our post Celebrating New Year’s with Children.

Leave a comment below and let us know your favorite Thanksgiving activities and ways to include your children. What do you love around Thanksgiving? What mistakes have your made? If you are looking for more fun family activities and tips, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.