By doing Thanksgiving projects you can choose to concentrate on quite an array of choices.

You can choose to make turkeys in a creative manner or you can make a Thanksgiving children’ s art mural. Of course you can also choose to make any number of copycat crafts, but I am assuming that you don’t want to do that.

If you want the children to relate a bit more to how the Indians lived so many years ago, a wonderful activity is introducing them to clay projects. It is a wonderful way to have them see and feel the actually type of clay that the Indians used to make so many necessary items.

Children now days tend to think that milk comes from the grocery store(unless they live on a farm) and apples from the produce section.

It is  truly educational to have the children work with gray clay that comes from the ground and to learn  how the Indians made  their jewelry, food utensils  and  other important things they needed.

The clay I use is usually Marblex and you can buy the gray clay online or at most large art centers. Another thing to realize is that even though I call it gray clays,  it’s not always gray but can be white or red. (It is of the air drying sort of clay.)

You can find other posts describing better usage of the clay and even how to  store the clay.

The clay comes either in one large bag or a few smaller ones and needs to be cut with a string or wire.

It’s always best to allow the children to play with the clay before hand if they have not gotten a chance to use it yet.

After they have had their fill, I would start with the clay beads first. Havel the children  break off pieces and roll them into small balls.

Once that is done, give them a straw or something else cylinder like, not too thin and not too thick.

The children can then make holes in them and leave their beads to dry.

Make sure you store each individual child’s beads on their own plate or tray.

When the beads are dry, the children can paint them. Once the paint is dry they can string them with yarn that you have pre knotted and voila! they have Indian clay bead necklaces.

Clay Pots

The second clay item I would do with the children is to have them make clay pots.

Again, the children should be very familiar with the clay before beginning to “make” anything.

To make clay pots, you begin with a  large ball of clay around the size of an orange or a grapefruit.

Holding the ball in one hand, take the thumb of the other hand and keep turning the clay around to form a pot.

Even though it sounds like everyone’s will come out the same, believe it or not everyone ends up looking different.

You need to make sure that they children don’t press too hard as the walls will get too thin and then crack when dried.

Allow to dry and then you can have them paint them or just make Indian designs on them.

If you do want them to make some kind of designs on top of the paint, you need to use either thin black paintbrushes and black paint OR black markers. In that case you need to have the children choose a solid color to paint the pot with or else you will not see the designs.

If you are not going to decorate on top of the paint than you can just let them paint them any colors they’d like.

Some people like to varnish the the pots after they are dry and some leave them to dry naturally.

If you are leaving them dry naturally you can try this technique:

When the pots  are half dry you can shine them up by rubbing the back of a plastic spoon over the pieces of clay. If you do this carefully shining each section carefully, the ports get this really neat shine to them. (you need a lot of patience for this)

If you have any specific questions on the  above processes, please feel free to post a comment and I will try to answer you quickly.

Happy Thanksgiving