Try out these great indoor games with your preschooler this winter!
Gratitude Cards
Author:
one tough job
Gratitude Conversation Cards
From our friends over at the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, we’re excited to share this Gratitude Cards activity. Regularly sharing gratitude and feelings of thankfulness is a great way to prompt our children to pause, reflect on, and appreciate the great things in their lives.
Here are the steps to this simple, but effective way to help kids build the habit of grattitude:
1. Use index cards to write questions that spark conversations of thanks, gratitude, and appreciation. Or, print out these ready-made conversation cards from Making Caring Common.
a. How has someone helped you recently and how did that make you feel?
b. Think of something fun you did recently. What did other people do to make that fun thing possible?
c. Name something about each other that you are thankful for and why.
2. Set aside time a family member to pull a conversation card and read it. If a younger child is reading the card, assist them where needed to read it aloud.
3. Lead by example: your child will learn what gratitude means based on how you speak about it.
4. Keep it regular and keep it fun. Maybe you pick a day of the week to be the conversation card day, and do this activity every week on the same day. Encourage new prompts, especially from older children who can think of their own questions on this theme.
We teach our children to say thank you, but cultivating a gratitude routine helps them notice, think about, and then feel the gratitude on their own terms.
A regular gratitude practice also helps a child to identify what feels good to them. By forming the gratitude habit with your child, you’re giving them a frame of reference for what they need to feel supported. This can help them in future relationships, work, and navigating the world. We’d love to know what kinds of conversation cards you and your children like to answer!
