There is a craft that I love to do every year around this time. November is the perfect time to focus on thankfulness and I love crafts that really highlight being thankful. Oriental Trading offers a great craft called Tree of Thanks. I just call them Thankful Trees. The tree is easy to construct and then the leaves are attached with glue dots. The glue dots make the craft mess free and make sure that the leaves don’t fall off – which will happen with regular glue or glue sticks.
I encourage the girls to use all their leaves and write one item they are thankful for on each leaf. Some of them moan like this is an impossible task, but I think it’s good to push them to think hard about what they are thankful for. For me, I feel like I could have used double the leaves I was given. Obviously this foam tree can’t hold all that I am thankful for. The one thing that I learned from doing the One Thousand Gifts Challenge is that there are so many gifts in each day. Yes, there are things like my home, family, and friends that are constant things in my life, but each day the good gifts of the Lord abound. The things I wrote on my tree are some of my top blessings and some just random ones- like pajamas. My heart always feels so light as write down each gift the Lord has given to me. I look forward to this craft night every year. It’s a great visual reminder of how blessed we are and it’s a call to thankfulness.
Last night overall was a great night! We started of with part two of our Whoonu tournament. It’s a game all about your favorite things and we are taking turns to make sure that everyone in class gets to pick her favorite things. This game is great for getting to know what the girls like and don’t like. Our lesson time focused on prayer and what it is. I want the girls to come away with the idea that prayer is talking to God just like they would talk to their friends. Nothing fancy, but simple, honest communication with God. We celebrated Audrey’s birthday by singing “Happy Birthday” and each blowing out a candle. They loved it just as much as I thought they would! We closed the night by working on our Thankful Trees. As I left the church last night, I could help but smile as I thought about how blessed I am by my class and by the youth helpers that share it with me.
Amy Scott's Thoughts 