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.
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. 😉
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!
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
- Fill out the email information above to receive the printable directly in your inbox.
- 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.
- 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.
- Put print in the frame without the glass.
- Attach the leaves to the print with a permanent adhesive such as a glue gun or permanent glue dots.
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.
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!
Hi! We updated the Free Printables page to include the JPG version as well! 🙂
What size is best for printing the tree?
I printed mine on paper that is 16×20 and it looks great!
Where do I find the leaf printables?
Hi Jill! It’s a page in the printable document, along with the tree! 🙂
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?
Hobby Lobby, and it’s about 3 inches thick!
I waited for a sale, so I got it for $35. 🙂
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!
You should only need to put the password in once; if you don’t have PDF, you should download the JPEG version. Please let me know if I can help in any additional way! [email protected]
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
Thanks for the tips Jennifer! Great idea for an affordable group craft project! 🙂
I can’t find the printable page for the leaves….
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! 🙂
Is this still available? All the links show “Page Not Found”
Hi Miranda! This print is available to I Heart Naptime subscribers. If you subscribe, it should send the link to the printable to your email! 🙂
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!
Do I need to ask to print any special way ?
Print in color in a 16×20 size! 🙂
Hi this is so cute. I signed up for the download and the page will not open from the email.
Hi Michele! If you are still having trouble, send me an email at [email protected] and I can try and send it to you!
Yeah I finally got the email
the pdf file was blank
would have been fun
hope you can fix this
sorry i must be impatient it took a while to load
thanks
I’m glad you got it! 🙂
I signed up as [email protected] but still did not receive my free printable tree.
Go ahead and send us an email at [email protected] and we can try and send it to you.
Please send me the printable tree! Thanks
Hi Mary! You just need to subscribe and you will get the printables! 🙂
please send me the thanksgiving tree. its great. i cant find how to download it.
Hi! This printable is only available for subscribers. If you enter your name and email it will be sent to you.
thank you!!
thankful printable please
Hi Mary! The printable is available only to subscribers. Once you subscribe, the printable will be sent to you via email. 🙂
Thankful printable please!
Hi Heather! Once you subscribe it will be sent to you! 🙂
This is awesome that your willing to share. I love this for my Young Woman
Beautiful craft!
I appreciate the free thankful tree printable
I’m so glad you are able to use it! 🙂
What size paper should the leaves sheet be printed on?
White Cardstock!
love to have the thankful tree printable
Thank you for the free printables. I love some of the recipes also.
Thank you!
Love to have a thankful tree
Thank you thank you for the printables
This thanksful free is perfect. I’d love to get my hands on it.
what a great idea!
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!
Thank you
Such a great idea