ALT-1 Thanksgiving Party Games for Children
Children often become quite bored at large family dinners. As the children tire the louder and more dispruptive they become, often leaving the host or hostess a nervous wreck and causing cooking errors before the meal makes its debut at the table.
A great way to keep the children attending these events occupied and happy is to surprise them with party games which include prizes. Few children are not drawn to the quarter and fifty cent machines which sell token toys, stickers, and jewelry they see while out shopping with adults. Though these little tokens are worthless to an adult, they can be great treasure in the eyes of a child. The first step in planning out the games which the children will play on Thanksgiving is stopping by a few of these machines when no children are along and purchasing $5.00 or $6.00 worth of these tokens. Be sure to allow enough prizes for a few rounds of each game and what is left over at the end of the festivities can be given as party tokens to each child.
Next we must take into consideration the age of the children who will be in attendance for our Thanksgiving meal in order to select suitable games. If you are rather creative, the games need not pose much expense. Thanksgiving Day the host or hostess needs to assign another adult or a willing teenager in attendance to take charge of the games while he or she is in the kitchen.
Almost all children enjoy games in which they are blindfolded. One very simple and very inexpensive game you can make yourself is one in which the children are blindfolded and try to drop clothespins into a quart canning jar. You can draw pilgrims and turkeys on a handful of clothespins with colorful fine tip markers prior to Thanksgiving day and use a bandana or scarf as a blindfold. Each child is given one turn with all the clothespins. The child who sucessfully drops the most clothespins in the jar wins a prize from the bag of token toys you purchased. In order to avoid arguments among the children, it would be better to have each prize winner or the adult in charge choose the prize at random, sight unseen, from the bag.
"Pin the Tail on the Turkey" is another cute game in which the children can wear the blindfold. It is played just like "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" and can be purchased or can be made by you ahead of Thanksgiving.
A quiet game for elementary age children is to simply give each a piece of paper and pencil and have them make as many words as they can using the letters of the word Thanksgiving. Set a reasonable time limit. The game can be repeated using other Thanksgiving related words, such as pilgrims or pumpkins.
If you have folding chairs, a game of musical chairs can be quite fun to the children. Taping a small picture of a turkey or pilgrim underneath one of the dining chairs works well after dinner for a grand prize as long as you are not assigning seating arrangements. A larger prize can go to the winner who chose that seat. This can make for quite a few laughs among the adults should it be an adult who chose the special chair to dine in. A giant, colorful lolipop works well for the grand prize.
Game ideas are limited only by your imagination and can make for a very memorable and fun time for all in attendance.
