The Thanksgiving Activity Book

Four stories about the harvest table, fifty puzzles, three games for the table, and a true one about where the holiday comes from.

Three read-aloud stories run through the book — a hedgehog whose basket is too heavy to carry alone, an owl who thinks he has nothing to bring to supper, and a lost goose on a rainy night when the table was set for five. Each story is wrapped in its own maze, a picture to color and a dot-to-dot, so the characters a child reads about are the ones they help and color. A fourth, true story closes the book: where Thanksgiving comes from, told plainly — the harvest feasts of long ago, the three-day feast the Wampanoag joined, the day a president named and the day Canada fixed — with no costumes and no pageant, and a word scramble and a color-by-number of its own.

• 4 stories, 4 pages each — helping, being thankful, making room for one more, and the true story of the day itself
• 50 puzzles in 8 kinds — mazes (including a pumpkin, a leaf and round ones), word searches in painted harvest frames, dot-to-dots, counting, odd-one-out, shadow matching, find-the-pair, spot-what-changed — plus two word scrambles and a color-by-number
• Three games for the table — harvest bingo with two cards, roll-a-turkey with a die, and eight table-talk cards to cut out and pass round at supper
• Every maze is someone helping someone — a puppy finding its mother, a bug out of the web before the spider comes
• 10 big pictures to color, each with a blank page behind it so markers never spoil the next puzzle
• A feelings page, a do-and-do-not page for the table, and a family tree to fill in
• Every puzzle checked by the program that drew it — every maze has one way through, every word sits in its grid exactly once, every answer is in the back
• The harvest, the table and the people round it — the food and the family, never a costume

It is not the same day everywhere, so a page inside gives both: the fourth Thursday of November in the United States, the second Monday of October in Canada. No year is printed anywhere.

For ages 4–8, in a big 8.5 × 8.5 inch format. From KidsColorWorks — pages they can actually do.