Giving LOTS of Thanks!

Our 5th and 6th grade group met for their last class of 2014 yesterday, and with it being only 4 days until Thanksgiving, I figured it would be a good idea to do some giving of thanks!

Our messy game of the day was a partner challenge: One partner laid on their backs while another dipped mini marshmallows in chocolate sauce and tried to toss them into their partner's mouths. Yum!

We started with a trip through the Bible to find examples of people giving and showing thanks. Since this year we're digging through the New Testament, I picked Anna, the leper, and Jesus as our focus characters (Luke 2:36-38, Luke 17:11-19, and Matthew 14:18-20). We did a jigsaw in teams filling out this paper about who gave thanks, for what, and how they showed it. Then we shared out so we all heard every story!

Once the Bible exploration was done, we got down to some games and crafts! 

Before the kiddos came, I had taped two sets of the letters T-H-A-N-K-F-U-L to the bottom of 16 plastic ducks and hid them around the church. We split into two teams (their favorite: boys against girls!) and raced to find 8 different ducks. They had a blast! Even though the ducks weren't hidden SUPER well (let's be real, I needed to be able to find them afterward!) it was still a challenge to check that they didn't get any doubles. And of course, if they did find a double, they just had to re-hide them in a harder spot so the other team couldn't find them!

Once all the ducks were collected, we wrote the letters on this sheet and each person named one thing they were thankful for that started with that letter. 

Then, they chose one of those items and wrote it on a strip of paper with their name and we played Thanksgiving Guess Who! I pulled a card out of the bag and read it aloud. Each team had 1 guess as to who had written it. I was surprised at how well they did! Of course, it helped that the letters had forced them to write crazy things, like unicorns and turkey!

Our final project was meant to show how incredibly blessed we are as Americans and as Christians. First, we made paper bag cornucopias by twisting the bottom of a bag and then folding back the top.

Then, we filled up our cornucopias with all our blessings by writing things we're thankful for on slips of paper, crumpling them up, and putting them in! It was incredible to see how full and colorful our cornucopias were- and how thankful we need to be for all the amazing things in our lives!

We had a great time being thankful. Now on to the turkey! :)