Thanksgiving Crafts for Kids- Lantern Turkeys

This idea for lantern turkeys is one of those Thanksgiving crafts for kids that works on basic skills and leaves you with a fun decoration for the holiday.  The basic body shape of the turkey is made of lantern. The turkey feathers are leaf-shaped. The facial features are a wide variety of traditional and unique closed shapes. Creating each of these works on several cutting skills (straight lines, curved areas, and shapes).

How to Make Thanksgiving Crafts Using a Lantern

Let me walk you through how to make a lantern turkey step by step.

We started by creating a lantern. A length of a paper towel tube cut down by a 1/4 was laid down on a piece of brown construction paper. The construction paper was cut lengthwise just about an inch above the top of the tube.  The slats of the lantern were cut out of this piece of construction paper and folded in half. The slats were cut up from the fold to about about an inch and a half away from the top of the paper. ( If you are worried about cutting too close too the top you can fold the top section down about an inch half. Then you can cut up to the folded-down area.) We then glued the top and bottom of the lantern to the cardboard tube. The paper is a little bigger than the tube so, as you glue the edges down you get a little bulge in the middle of the lantern. This bulge is the turkey’s belly.

Then we moved on to make the turkey’s tail feathers. I drew the outline of a leaf on five different colored pieces of construction paper. Then each leaf was cut out.  You could easily trace your children’s hands onto paper and cut them out. They would be great tail feathers too.  After all the tail feathers had been cut out, they were glued to the back of the cardboard tube. Our feathers were placed near the top of the tube. We tried them lower down and they were hard to see.

Finally, we reached into our scrap paper box and found the paper needed to make facial features for the turkey. The turkey’s head was made by folding brown paper in half and cutting the keyhole shape. Then black and white paper was used to cut out circles for the eyeballs.  A yellow triangle was cut out to make the beak. A red flattened-out cloud was cut out to make the waddle.

These Thanksgiving crafts would look great in a cluster or a row on a mantle at home or as a centerpiece at a school celebration. For more Thanksgiving ideas you may want to visit my Thanksgiving Ideas for Kids Pinterest board.

As I mentioned I am participating in the Thanksgiving series with All Things Kids bloggers . Please take a moment to visit their posts too.