While you’re busy in the kitchen whipping up a feast, entertain the children with a fun and easy Thanksgiving Game: Turkey Bowling! You can prepare the “pins” in advance in a matter of minutes, or you can let the older children get crafty. Either way, this is a fun Thanksgiving activity for kids that gets everyone up, moving, and laughing!

With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, it’s time to start thinking about the big day! And while so many of us tend to focus only on the food, let’s not forget about the little ones!  After all, you’ll likely be spending quite a bit of time with the kids in the days surrounding the holiday, so wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple new activity to play with them? This Turkey Bowling is perfect for just about any age!

You can probably look at my pictures and see how I created the turkey pins, but here’s a quick list of supplies that you will need:

• Large brown plastic cups (I used these)
• Paint sample strips in a variety of colors (I picked up the red, green, and yellow “feathers” for free at Lowes — they already had the pointed top, but you could cut your strips in any feather-like shape)
• Plastic googly eyes (like these)
• Orange construction paper cut into the shape of triangles for the turkeys’ beaks
• Glue (I used a hot glue gun, but I also tried it with regular school glue. The hot glue gun dries much faster, but the regular glue also works)
• Tape (to attach the feathers to the cups)
• A bowling “ball” (we used mini pumpkins that were leftover from Halloween, but a tennis ball or a similar round object would also work)

My boys loved this game, and I only managed to take a few pictures of them playing because I was laughing so hard.

You can stack your turkeys in a pyramid shape as shown in a photo above, but on this particular day it was so windy that our pins kept blowing over! Instead, we opted for a more traditional bowling shape…

The idea is to roll the pumpkin (or ball) at the turkeys to see how many you can knock down or move; however, Casey and Spence thought that it would be much more effective to just use an overarm throw! Um, yes…that definitely knocked over some turkeys!

When he wasn’t launching pumpkins himself, Spence stood on the sidelines, munched on his snack, and tried to avoid flying objects…

Enjoy the holiday, and have fun celebrating with the little ones!