With Thanksgiving soon, this is a great season to teach kids about gratitude. Teaching it while they are young will help to reinforce a thankful attitude when they are older.
According to UNC Chapel Hill’s Raising Grateful Children project, there are four major elements to gratitude that are learned in childhood:
Learning these skills helps children to not only address their feelings, but to understand others’ perspectives. It’s a big step toward social emotional intelligence. The earlier you start to teach about gratitude, the better.
Here are three tips on how to teach gratitude this season.
Teach your kids about gratitude by having them show appreciation when others do something for them. Remind them of good experiences and happy memories to reinforce that gratitude.
You can continue to reinforce that in the simple interactions at school or at home. When you help them get something done or bring them a treat, ask them for examples of how they can respond when someone does something nice for them.
It’s one thing to ask a child to say, “thank you,” but they won’t completely understand it if they’re not grasping the feeling of what they’re saying. So, as you reinforce thank you, explain why we say it and how it makes us feel. You can ask the following questions:
This is a great way to teach kids about gratitude. The continued dialogue will help the lesson sink in and they will not only inherently say thank you, but will actually feel it. Feeling the emotion and being able to put a name to it goes a long way toward living a grateful lifestyle in childhood, as well as into adulthood.
This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in life and forget to speak with intentionality and model gratitude. Mentioning what you’re thankful for will teach kids about gratitude.
Try to bring up what you are thankful for in even the most mundane of situations. For example:
Explaining what you feel gratitude for – not just saying that you are grateful, but also going into detail on emotions – helps lend insight into another person’s perspective. Hopefully they will start seeing that they are not the only people who should feel thankful – adults do, too.
Many children love learning lessons through art. Here are ideas for Thanksgiving crafts, particularly ones that reinforce the tenets of gratitude mentioned above:
Gratitude Picture Collage
Ask students to draw a picture of something they are thankful for and write why they are grateful for those things/people/places. Or if you are doing this craft with your children, let them go around your home and take pictures of all the things they are thankful for. Gather the drawings or pictures and make a collage to show all that you have to be grateful for.
Gratitude Journal
During the days leading up to Thanksgiving, ask students to journal each day about something they are thankful for. This can be a simple phrase like, “Grandma,” or “My dog Spike.” Or you can have them add why they are thankful for that particular person, item, or experience. You also have the option to take this activity farther by putting all of these things in a journal that the child can decorate. (You can make a journal by folding multiple standard letter-sized papers in half and stapling the center seam.)
The Grateful Turkey
Use The Grateful Turkey template to have kids list things they are thankful for. Cut out the turkey and feathers. On each of the feathers students can write one thing they are thankful for. Glue or tape the feathers onto the turkey and color/decorate. Alternately, you can buy a large poster board and draw a turkey, but leave its tail unfeathered. Make large tail feathers out of regular paper and have students each write one thing they are thankful for on a feather and decorate it. Adhere the feathers to the turkey for one large, uniquely decorated Grateful Turkey.
Adapted from "Ways to Teach Your Kids Gratitude" on Nobody's Ready.
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