Kids Activity: Thanksgiving Turkey Hunt

Thanksgiving in America traditionally involves a turkey. Each year, we take our kids on their own personal Turkey Hunt. They LOVE it. And we have a blast too.

First, we cut construction paper into fourths. (You can use index cards if this is easier and readily available. You can also use regular printer paper or loose leaf paper. Whatever you have on hand will work.) Then we give each child three or four pieces of paper, and take a few pieces for ourselves. We then make a turkey on each. Some years we’ve gotten carried away with our crafting and made 3-D turkeys instead.

Here are some ideas for your turkeys:

1. Trace your child’s hand and let them color it in, drawing a beak and feet.
2. Trace their hand on a sheet of construction paper, cut it out and glue it to your sheet.
3. Let them use paint and a hand print to make their turkey.
4. Let them draw or color the turkey.
5. Use craft items like craft foam, feathers, wiggly eyes, and pom poms, and felt to build a small turkey on the page, or independent of the page.
6. If you want, you can print small clip art turkeys and let your kids color them.
7. You can use fancy lettering to decorate the word Turkey if you don’t want to draw or make one.
8. Or, if you’re feeling really silly, you can use pictures of your kids and call them your “little turkeys”.
9. As always, your imagination is the limit to what you can do.

Once our turkeys are complete we need cages to keep them in once we’ve caught them. We’ve used brown paper sacks, shoe boxes, tissue boxes, and even ziplock bags for this purpose in the past. Pretty much anything will work. If you are using something disposable, you can decorate it or draw bars on it like a cage.

When our turkeys and cages are complete, we choose our first Guide for our Turkey Hunt. Our Guide hides all of the turkeys in the forest, one room of the house. Once they are all hidden, the Turkey Hunt begins. Our hunters, the other children or players, begin to search for the turkeys. As they are found, our hunters bring their catch to their Guide. The Guide will keep the captured turkeys pinned up according to the hunter who has caught them.

Once all the turkeys have been found, we count how many each hunter caught. The hunter who has caught the most turkeys becomes the Guide for our next hunt. And the game begins again. The kids love it. They have fun making a mess and making their turkeys, then they play with them over and over again until Thanksgiving has come and gone.