Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey

I often feel like Thanksgiving is a looked over holiday. With all the excitement surrounding Halloween and Christmas, sometimes Thanksgiving is left out. I LOVE Thanksgiving, I love spending time with family, and I love that we have a holiday to recognize gratitude. I think that Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to teach our children about the importance of gratitude and to focus on our blessings. This past week for Family Home Evening we decided to do just that, focus on our family's blessings and on gratitude. Halloween and Christmas have their countdowns, I don't think Thanksgiving should be left out, so we made a "Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey."

To make this craft I used:

-2 Styrofoam balls, one large, and one slightly smaller

-Brown spray paint

-Popsicle sticks

-2 red pipe cleaners

-A foam turkey face

-Colorful cardstock

-Hot glue

-A glue stick

I printed each family member their own thankful sheet for them to write down blessings. I did twenty five total (for the countdown) and the cut them into feather shapes. If you trust little hands, you can have them cut out their own, in my house Mom and Dad cut out most of them. Then we talked about what gratitude was and wrote down all of the things we are grateful for. Of course one of the things I am grateful for is food. :) After they were cut and filled out, we used glue sticks to attach the feathers to popsicle sticks.
We then let Daddy assemble our turkey while we made treats. We took the styrofoam balls outside on skewers to spray paint them, then left one of the skewers in and cut it in half. We used the skewer to attach the head and the body, you could also use a popsicle stick to do the same job. Then we flatted the bottom of the body ball by pressing it on the counter, so our turkey would sit up.
Daddy then poked the feathers into the body part of our turkey. As much fun as this part is to let the kids do, I wanted to reuse this guy next year, so we had Daddy do it.
For the turkey's face I had found this foam turkey kit for $1.99 at Micheal's. We used the face and attached it to the head of our turkey with hot glue.
We made some feet with pipe cleaner and our Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey was complete! Starting November 1, after dinner each day we will pull out a feather and talk about the blessing that the member of our family wrote down. We will talk about why we are grateful for that blessing and what it means to be thankful.
Here is a view from the back, the feathers became to heavy for our turkey, so we ended up using an extra popsicle stick to prop him up, from the front you would never know.
Here is another front view of our turkey. I think he turned out really cute and I am excited to continue this tradition for years to come!