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For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving this Thursday, I hope you’re all set to chow down and cozy up amongst your family and friends. It may be the turkey’s least favorite day of the year, but it’s one of our favorites! If your festivities include any number of children, you probably need a variety of things to occupy their time all day. This is one of our time-honored favorites:

The classic “Hand Turkey.” There are many ways to make a hand turkey, but each piece of art is always unique and is a nice snapshot of who you child was at each particular Thanksgiving. The kind we’re making involves some Thanksgiving-colored construction paper (yellow, orange, red, brown, etc), markers, a glue stick, and (safety) scissors. Optional: google eyes and feathers.

Step One: make a fist with the hand you don’t write with, but leave your thumb sticking out. Place this fist onto a piece of light-colored paper and trace around the edges in marker. Your paper should look something like this:

Step Two: close off the bottom of the turkey body, and add some legs! Now it’s time to fill in your bird. You can color in the turkey with markers or cut shapes out of construction paper. Make sure you add an eye (or a google eye if you have one!) and a beak to the turkey’s face (your thumb!) and even one of those funny waddles under its chin:

Step Three: now it’s time for some feathers! Your turkey’s tail plumage will be made of construction paper “feathers.” It’s a nice tradition for some (or all!) of the feathers to have one thing written on it for which you are giving thanks.

Step Four: have all your feathers? Great. Now it’s time to glue them onto your turkey body. Step back and admire your work! If you’d like, you can even draw in a background for your fine feathered friend.

For more Thanksgiving craft ideas, you can consult this guide full of ideas and tutorials. We hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!