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FREE Thanksgiving Thankful Tree Printable

This thankful tree is the perfect activity to do with your children during the Thanksgiving season. Use this free printable to infuse gratitude into your family’s holiday traditions this year—it’s beneficial (and fun!) for everyone.

This sweet Thanksgiving tree is one of my favorite fall crafts for kids. Some other fun activities to try this November include these free coloring pages and these smart pumpkin carving ideas.

thanksgiving thankful tree

What’s a Thankful Tree?

If you haven’t seen one before, a Thanksgiving tree is simply a visual way for your family to practice gratitude. The leaves serve as opportunities for your family to write down items they are grateful for. You can make one tree for the whole family, or even give each member their own tree to complete.

Thanksgiving Traditions

We have a lot of traditions for holidays in our home, particularly for Halloween and Christmas.  A few years ago, I decided I wanted to build in a tradition to help our whole family focus on what Thanksgiving should really be about.

I researched several ideas but settled on this thankful tree printable. The actual printable in this post is free, which makes the entire project inexpensive, meaningful, and simple enough for everyone in the family to get involved.

I love that the printable leaves have a watercolor texture. It makes it look like you pulled out a pan of watercolors and spent hours creating a beautiful background. Everyone will be none the wiser. 😉

thankful tree

A Sweet Keepsake

My favorite thing about this craft is collecting it over the years and looking back on them as a family each November. Simply save the printable file on your computer and print it year after year. It’s way better than just saying what you’re grateful for because everything is written down and you can bring it out every year.

It’s so fun to see what the kids come up with each year when filling out the thankful tree. Some of their answers had me laughing out loud—you honestly never know the things your child will pick to add!

printable leaves for thankful tree

Supplies Needed:

The best part about this craft (besides the sweet answers your kids give!) is how simple it is to put together. You only need a few items to make it, and you likely have most of these at home already.

  • FREE Printable (download below)
  • White Card Stock
  • Scissors
  • Sharpie Marker
  • Glue Gun or Glue Dots
  • 16X20 Frame

How to Make the Thankful Tree

  1. Fill out the email information above to receive the printable directly in your inbox.
  2. Print off the thankful tree printable. Because this is a 16 x 20 printable, you may opt to have it printed at a local copy shop rather than at home.
  3. Next, cut out all the leaves and write things your family is grateful for on each leaf. You can do a couple a day leading up until Thanksgiving or all at once.
  4. Put print in the frame without the glass.
  5. Attach the leaves to the print with a permanent adhesive such as a glue gun or permanent glue dots.
thankful tree craft

Helpful tips

  • Decide if you will create a tree as a family or individually.  Once you know this, you’ll know how many copies of the printable to have on hand. You can even assign each child a color of leaf to fill out to remember who did what.
  • Print the thankful tree printable at a print shop. Not only will the printable come out much nicer, but this printable is a generous 16 x 20 size. Unless your printer has a larger format, you’ll likely need to spend a dollar or two (literally) to have it printed.
  • Have the leaves cut out and ready. Keep the leaves in a basket on the kitchen island or dining table along with a permanent marker, and encourage your kids to fill out a few each day.
  • Help out your younger children. Ask them at dinner or during snack time what they are thankful for, and jot it down.
thanksgiving thankful tree leaves

More Thanksgiving Activities to Try:

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55 Comments

  1. This is my first time doing a project like this, and I was wondering how you printed the tree at Walmart.  I went to the photo print store online and it has to be .jpg.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks!

  2. I LOVE this & will be putting this together for sure! Thank you so much for sharing!!! Where did you find your frame? How thick is your frame?

  3. I love this! But I’m having difficulty getting to the printable page. I seem to be in an endless loop of downloading the extension and then getting a page where a password is needed. Any suggestions? Thank you!

  4. This is beautiful! Thank you. I printed 3 of them so my daughters could each have one. So much to be grateful for! Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

  5. Hello,
    I love the tree but for some reason, I’m unable to print it, it requires a password, let me know how I can print…would love to use it for our Thanksgiving this year…
    thank you so much

    1. Hi Susan! You need to be a newsletter subscriber to get the password… we have many places to sign up, but the easiest to navigate is on the bottom of our homepage, in the blue area. Please let me know if you’d like any additional assistance! Thanks!

  6. I printed these and had my 10-year old daughter and her friends do the project after school today.  The girls loved it!  It started some great conversations between the girls about family, pets, etc, and how lucky they all are.  This is a wonderful craft — it is fun and it helped the girls think about all that they have to be thankful for. Thanks for sharing it!

  7. Thank you for this! I am doing these with our church family on Friday. For anyone who is interested in making it smaller. It prints nicely on standard cardstock and then scale the leaves page down to 80%. They then fit the tree and are still easy to write on and read. a $1 store frame makes it an affordable large group project.

    1. Hi Anne! This printable is exclusively for those who subscribe to I Heart Naptime! If you would like to subscribe and receive this printable along with dozens of other darling printables, there is a link on the post! 🙂

      1. I subscribed and received the printable, but it’s only the pdf version. Your comments above make it sound like I can also receive the jpeg – is this the case? If so, how can I request that? Thanks!

  8. Thank you so much for sharing your artistic talents with me. I, too, am an artist. YOUR tree is beautiful. I hope you don’t mind but I needed to change the format so I could use the fonts on my computer to write what I was thankful for on my leaves.

    I have been keeping a digital diary for over 20 years now and I added your “Thankful tree to it. It will help me to remind me that no matter how bad things may get at times “There is ALWAYS something to be thankful for.” Recalling these things and naming them changes my perspective and that is essential for happiness.
    God bless!