Friday 1 November 2013

October - a month for giving thanks

I want to teach my kids to be thankful for everything and in every circumstance. This past year or so, I've read One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp (as well as the One Thousand Gifts devotional). This inspired me to find a creative way to teach my oldest (Annalise) thankfulness. My youngest is too young to understand this yet. What I did was make a tree out of construction paper and tape it to the front door. Then, throughout the month, we wrote things that we were thankful for on Fall coloured leaves and taped them to the tree. I will be doing this again next year but then I want to make more of an effort to do it everyday (I'm thinking we could do it every morning when we wake up and every night before we go to bed). Annalise really enjoyed being part of this and it was wonderful to see development/growth in her ideas of things to be thankful for: from "trees" or "stuffies" to friends and teachers (each listed by name) and God. We were able to get 76 different leaves/ideas on that tree! We started October 1st and ended October 31st. Here's a photo of the completed tree. :)


I already posted this to Facebook (sorry for the double posting friends) but then decided I need to blog about it as well. :)  I think I will do the same thing for November, this time focussing on Remembrance Day. :) Perhaps it will be a poppy field. But that will be for a different blog post.