🙏Thankful 🌳Tree🍂 • 🦃Thanksgiving Inspired ✂️Craft•

As 🦃 Thanksgiving is approaching, we try to slow down, reflect, and be thankful for all the blessings we are so fortunate with. By instilling gratitude in my children, I hope to ensure that they will have all the tools necessary to meet every situation with a mindset of abundance, appreciation, and joy. Gratitude, a powerful mindset of "having enough," can bring the fullness of life, and we as parents and teachers can play a vital role in helping our children learn a lifelong appreciation for what we already have, rather than what we do not. So, today, I asked Adrian to self-reflect and think about which things make him happy and what he is thankful for. “Each day, each season, each cycle offers something of beauty. Let us notice and give thanks.” – Diane Mariechild. And to display Adrian's gratitude-reflections, we will be making a 🙏Thankful 🌳Tree🍂.

What you will need to make a🙏Thankful 🌳Tree🍂:

• recycled paper-towel roll,
• Mache paste for paper mache application (we are using this Mod Podge),
• recycled brown tissue paper for the tree's trunk,
• pipe-cleaners for brunches,
• hole puncher,
• besides Adrian's Thankful Hearts, to decorate our Thankful Tree, we are using wooden maple leaves, laminated dried leaves we have collected during nature walks and DIY play dough leaves children made. 

Cut the bottom of the paper-towel roll in strips, so that the tree will stand. 
Using paper mache technique, cover paper-roll with brown tissue paper to resemble the trunk. 
Once the ♻️roll is dry, make holes and insert double-twisted pipe-cleaners as branches. 
I laminated dried leaves to use as decorations in addition to Adrian's Thankful Hearts.

“Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It means learning to live your life as if everything were a miracle, and being aware on a continuous basis of how much you’ve been given.” ~ Marelisa Fábrega

Paper-clips work great instead of ornament hooks. See here "🍁Fall-Inspired Odd & Even" activity using these wooden maple leaves. 
Adrian is thankful for Julia, Mam, and Dad. His world is small yet but plentiful. 

Adrian decorated his Thankful Tree with DIY play dough leaves (see how he made them here). 

 The ends of pipe-cleaners can also be used to attach decorations to. 

Adrian is also thankful to himself for himself.

We also added felt leaves, acorns, and pine-cones as decorations.

“In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and all I have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.” ~ Henri Nouwen

Happy 🦃Thanksgiving! I hope your Holidays are blessed, bountiful and joyful! 

We did another craft using paper mache here "✂️DIY Pipe Cleaners ♻️Paper Mache 🦃Turkey• Thanksgiving Inspired ✂️Craft."

For more on Thanksgiving-Inspired activities, see here "🦃Thanksgiving Inspired Homeschooling 101 Unit Study." 

For more on Peace education, read here "Montessori ☮️PEACE Shelfie (Grace &Courtesy, Gratitude, Pillars of a Peaceful Character)."