Gratitude Pumpkins Kids Craft

This month I hosted a Kid's Craft Day at our church with an emphasis on Thankfulness. Although my lesson had a religious foundation, the craft portion can be used for anyone. It was fun, cheap, and easy for kids of all ages.

The idea was a merge of two similar crafts I saw on Pinterest; Moffatt Girls Thankful Pumpkins and Scottsdale Mom's Blog Paper Pumpkins. I took the two ideas and adapted them to work with the lesson I had planned and with a range of ages of kids I was expecting to have there. Like I mentioned, this was an activity for the kids at church and the bulk of them range from 18mos to 10 years old and this craft had to accommodate all those ages.

I started with the idea of listing things "I am thankful for...". I created a sheet with the prompt with six prompt strips and printed it on 8.5x11 card stock. Each child and a few adults filled in their answers. Some of the younger kids just colored and us adults filled in some answers for them.

The next step was to cut the strips. They varied in size from 1.5 to 2 inches. The fun part was using decorative scissors to cut the strips out. I also had cut out strips of yellow, red, and orange 1.5" strips of construction paper to fill in between the written prompt pieces.

Once all the pieces are in an order you like, I followed the Scottsdale Mom's Blog tutorial for most of the craft. I punched holes in the ends of the strips, and threaded the pipe cleaners through. I fanned out the strips and made it look fuller and take the pumping shape. This is where the two paper types really helps. The card stock give structure and the construction paper is thinner and more pliable to fill in the gaps between the heavier card stock strips.

Once everything looked pumpkin-y, I untwisted the pipe cleaners a little and wrapped them around the end of a pencil to give the curly look. Our pumpkins were finished with a leaf printout with the key bible verse of the lesson. Again, that can easily be adapted to just be a name tag like in the Moffatt Girls' tutorial.

All together this craft took about 15 to 20 minutes to put together. The kids ended up with a cute fall themed craft that also served as a reminder of all the things they are thankful for this year. I am also tempted to do this on a smaller scale for place cards at a table. The possibilities are endless.