Thanksgiving Activities for Kids: Build, Draw, and More

Thanksgiving Activities for Kids: Build, Draw, and More

Thanksgiving / Kid Activities


Thanksgiving morning has a shape: the turkey defrosts, the parade fills the TV, and the kids vibrate with nothing to do until dinner. It's a lot of energy waiting for a job.

The best Thanksgiving activities for kids are the ones they build, draw, and tell, because those leave something behind. This is a plan for a Thanksgiving that ends with a keepsake on the fridge.

Bring the Macy's Parade Home

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the only event where a balloon shaped like a cartoon cat counts as breaking news. America has a lot of celebrations to keep up with, and most of them come with a costume, a casserole, or a deadline. This one asks for pajamas and cinnamon rolls warming the kitchen, so it's the easiest tradition to keep, and 2026 brings the 100th parade.

A home parade runs best with a cast. One kid is the announcer, armed with a paper-tube microphone and strong opinions about every balloon. One is the balloon builder, one is the photographer, and anyone left over is the marching band, which in most houses means whoever finds the pots.

If the crowd along the route makes you sweat, our guide to keeping kids safe in a crowd makes the case for the living room. And if the day sprawls across two houses, the myFirst Fone S4 keeps the family coordinated without a group-chat meltdown.

Macy's Thanksgiving Parade History: Bears, Balloons, and 100 Parades

Before the craft supplies come out, tell the kids what they're celebrating. The first parade in 1924 grew out of Macy's own workforce, many of them European immigrants who missed the street festivals of their home countries. They borrowed live animals from the Central Park Zoo to march down Broadway, and as the story goes, the animals frightened some of the small children lining the route, which is a fair review of a live animal on Broadway.

In 1927 a Felix the Cat balloon took the animals' place, and puppeteer Tony Sarg's giant balloons became the parade's signature. The parade paused from 1942 to 1944 while rubber and helium went to the war effort, then came back bigger than ever, and it reached a national TV audience in 1948. The centennial lineup is on the parade's official page as Macy's announces it.

The zoo-to-balloon story sets up the craft: a parade once full of real animals is now full of characters a kid can reinvent.

Thanksgiving Crafts for Kids: Build Your Own Parade

Once the history's told, the craft table has a job. Thanksgiving crafts for kids can be as simple as leaf rubbings or gratitude tokens for the guests, and the parade build runs in three moves: design the character, tell its story, and march it down the hallway. For a sticker at every seat, there's also a guide to making Thanksgiving stickers at home.

Design Your Own Parade Character With the 3D Pen

The parade has always been a cartoon convention, with favorites like Snoopy and Pikachu floating over the route. A kid can pick a favorite or invent one, and the character starts on the Sketch Pro Neo, where a drawing stays until the kid clears it, so the shape can change as often as the idea does.

Then the 3D printing pen turns the flat drawing into an object. A 3d pen for kids like the myFirst 3dPen Make runs on low-heat PCL filament and is made for ages 6 and up, and the result is a small parade balloon a kid can hold in one hand. Tracing a shape from the pen's own templates first, a bicycle or a clownfish, makes a good warm-up before the invented character. The invented character will probably have too many legs. Extra legs are allowed.

Turn the Story Into a Comic

Now hand the character to the myFirst Insta magiBox. The kid tells the story out loud, and the best stories start with questions for the balloon: where is it going, what is it afraid of, who's riding on top? Expect the vacuum cleaner to show up as the villain. The mini sticker maker prints the answers as a four-panel strip in one of six art styles, ink-free in black and white.

It pairs once in the myFirst Circle app on mom's or dad's phone, then runs on home Wi-Fi. It's the part of the day that ends up taped to the bedroom door for weeks.

Print the At-Home March

Line the balloons up, march them down the hallway, and let the photographer capture it with the myFirst Kids Instant Camera. It prints full-color photos that are waterproof and fingerprint-resistant, and its frames and filters add a little parade flair.

The photographer's job is one wide shot of the whole parade and one close-up of each balloon. Expect at least one photo of the dog, who isn't in the parade. The prints become the gallery that goes on the fridge.

Thanksgiving Activities by Age

The little ones get their own lane, and so do the bigger kids.

Thanksgiving Crafts for Toddlers

Thanksgiving crafts for toddlers work best with big shapes and bigger forgiveness: large-shape tracing on a drawing board, sticker turkeys, and crayon turkeys that would lose any contest and still get taped to the fridge. A handprint turkey is the classic: trace the hand, color each finger a different feather, and write the date underneath so it becomes next year's comparison.

Activities for Preschoolers and Kindergarteners

Activities for preschoolers and kindergarteners can carry a little more intent. A preschooler can draw a Thanksgiving friend on the light up drawing board and tell you its name, its favorite food, and who it's thankful for. A kindergartener can tell the same friend's story to the magiBox sticker printer and get a comic back.

A 3D kid pen shape, like a pumpkin or a feather, waits until a kid is 6 and up, the age the 3dPen Make is made for. These are the years the making habit forms.

Thanksgiving Games for Kids

Thanksgiving games for kids can borrow the camera. A photo scavenger hunt with the instant camera that prints sends them looking for something orange, something round, something that belongs to grandma. The prints become a Thanksgiving gallery on the wall by dessert. Back on the couch, a round of name that balloon works for everyone: one kid describes a parade character without saying its name, and the rest guess. The announcer will cheat.

Turkey Day Activities and Things to Do on Thanksgiving

The broader list of turkey day activities is where the whole family joins in: parade bingo (a marching band, a balloon, a float, someone waving, and the first full row wins), a thankfulness paper chain, and a pre-dinner dance contest. For a shape to the day:

  • MorningThe parade on TV, bingo cards in hand.
  • MiddayThe balloons get built.
  • AfternoonThe march and the photo scavenger hunt.
  • DinnerThe strip and the gallery go around the table.

Things to do on Thanksgiving get easier when the plan is on the fridge by breakfast, because at noon the gravy splits and nobody is inventing anything.

Activities for Kids That Teach Gratitude

Save the quiet one for last. Gratitude activities for kids land hardest when they're said out loud. A kid tells the magiBox portable printer what they're thankful for this year, and the printed strip gets passed around the table at dinner. A gratitude jar with a daily paper note works too, for families who like a slower build. For a longer list, see our guide to gratitude activities for kids.

A morning of vibrating, it turns out, was a kid waiting for a job. By dinner there's a balloon on the hallway floor, a strip in someone's hand, and a gallery on the wall.

Sources and Further Reading

Key Takeaways

  • The Macy's parade is the easiest tradition to keep at home, and 2026 is the 100th, so it's worth a little ceremony.
  • The parade's history (zoo animals in 1924, balloons from 1927) is a story worth telling before the crafts begin.
  • A 3D pen turns a favorite parade character into an object a kid can hold in one hand.
  • A spoken story becomes a printed comic on the magiBox, and it outlasts the day.
  • Spread the day across parade, craft, photo, and gratitude moments, and nobody has to invent a plan at noon.
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