You’ve purchased all the supplies you’ll need to prepare a true Thanksgiving feast. Your home is clean, you’ve put away embarrassing photos, and you even made sure to mow the front lawn. You’re so excited to have your family and friends over to your house for Thanksgiving this year. But wait, your sister is bringing her two children, and your cousin is bringing her kids as well. How will you keep them entertained throughout the evening?
As many of you are creative jewelry makers, beading experts, and generally crafty individuals, I’m sure you can think of ways to use your skills to create fun projects that will keep the children entertained. Below are a few of our ideas to help get you started.
Paper plate turkeys
What you’ll need:
- Paper plates
- Craft feathers
- Tape
- Colored pencils or crayons
- Beads
- Craft glue
- Colored paper
- Scissors
Before the children arrive, you can create a small work station. Layout the paper plates, feathers, beads, tape, glue, and colored pencils. Use the scissors and colored paper to cut out the shapes of turkey feet, and place two at each pape
r plate. When the children arrive, everything will be set up for them to begin. They can tape the feet cut outs to the back of their plate. They can also pick out feathers to tape to the back of their plates. On the front of the plates, they can use the colored pencils or crayons to color in the turkey. The beads can be glued to the front of the plates to create the turkey’s eyes and beak. Any beads you have will do, glass beads, clay beads, crystal beads – as long as they are not too big or heavy. Once the glue is dry, the children have a turkey of their own to take home!
Homemade beads
What you’ll need:
- Polymer clay (you can get a variety of colors)
- Wax paper
- Tooth picks
- Oven
Creating clay beads is a great project to keep children entertained before the meal, and afterwards as well. Place a sheet of wax paper in front of every child to use as a work mat – the clay will not stick to the wax paper. Each child can pick out different colors to create their clay beads, they can even combine colors. For traditional round beads, they can pinch off a small amount of clay and roll it around until it forms a ball shape. Square, triangle or any other shape can also be formed by hand. Once the bead shapes are created, a wooden toothpick can be used to make a generously sized hole in the middle of each bead for stringing. An adult can then bake the beads in the oven according to the instructions on the clay packaging. After the meal, and after the beads have baked and cooled, the children can string their beads on woven string or plastic wire to create necklaces, bracelets or key chains.
