Make A Thankful Plate

I saw this idea last year on Pinterest in a baby shower theme and thought it could be worked into a fantastic way to celebrate Thanksgiving. 

 

Buy some $1 ceramic plates at a dollar store. They can really be any color as long as the color you chose for the marker will coordinate. At a craft store, find a Porcelaine 150 pen or other marker that is for writing on ceramics. Have the kids name off things they are thankful for, adding them to the plate as you go along. Once you are done, bake the plate according to the marker directions for the ink to completely set and dry.
Voila, you will have a wonderful reminder and keepsake of a year’s worth of blessings! Once a few years have gone by, there should be a nice little family stockpile of thankful plates to use for Thanksgiving dinner.

Crafty Apple Trees

As hard as I try, I am not particularly gifted when it comes to crafting. That is why this section is named, "For the Craft Impaired". My goal is to include easy, quick crafts that you can do with your kids that will not cost much, are simple to plan and don't require a ton of supplies.

My first craft experiment was to make apple trees with the kids arms/hands and then fingerprints for the apples.
1) They each traced their arms from the elbows to the hands and cut them out.
2)  After pasting them into place on another sheet of construction paper, we cut out green leaves for the tree and pasted them behind the fingers.
3) Using an inkpad, the kids put thumb and finger prints all over the "green" of their trees with little black stems. They wanted golden delicious apples hence the yellowish green apples!
4) They could always decorate them a little more, but otherwise, we are all done!

For many moms, this craft is super simple, but the kids enjoyed doing it and I have a keepsake of their hands and finger/thumbprints. Plus, it is a nice little fall decoration.