5 Things to Keep Your Kids Happy and Busy on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time of plenty. Plenty of food, plenty of fun, plenty of things to get done. While children are magical little creatures, they tend to make focusing on a task extremely difficult, and so in the name of preparing a good dinner and giving them a Thanksgiving to remember, give them something fun to do for turkey day.

1: Help with cooking

Children love to help. To make things around the kitchen easier, hand your kid a spoon to stir the soup with, let them measure ingredients, or have them grab things from across the room for you. While to adults these menial tasks may seem like work, they’re an adventure for a child, and afterwards you won’t be able to wipe the smile from their face as they proudly announce to the family that they helped with dinner.

2: Take a walk with family

With family around, food cooking, and festivities brewing, it’ll be nearly impossible to get your kids to sit still. So to work up an appetite and keep them from bouncing off the walls, take a walk together as a family. Depending on where you’re from, the weather will differ, but to a kid it’s all fun. Whether they’re crunching through snow or leaves, they’ll be over the moon to be outside with their favorite aunts and uncles and cousins that they may not get to see any other time of year.

3: Backyard Football

There’s nothing like some backyard football. Get a couple teams together, mark some boundaries out in the yard, dust off the old pigskin, and get to playing. Not only will they get to play all day, but they’ll get to come inside and watch the big game. The kids will enjoy their Thanksgiving dinner even more after a day full of grass stains and touchdowns, after all.

4: Board games

Everybody has some board games lying around in their closet, and while spinners and dice and cardboard don’t seem like the most exciting objects, putting them together in conjunction with some excitable kids will leave them having a memorable day and keep them out of your hair long enough to make dinner.

5: Arts and crafts

Kids can’t get enough of making a mess of things, so give them some markers and crayons and paper and free time, and let them unleash their inner Picasso. Turkey hand drawings are an obvious mainstay, but there’s also lots of potential with feathers, beads, origami, and more.