This activity is almost no prep but tons of fun. Save a few ads or magazines that feature Thanksgiving foods and you are set.

Tell your kiddo that they are a world renowned chef creating an amazing Thanksgiving dinner. Let them cut out items that will be in their meal and glue it onto the top of their page. If you are not coming up on Thanksgiving you can always modify this to be any fancy dinner, or they could write about their favorite meal.

Tell them to write what they would tell someone who is about to eat the feast they made.

I have a reluctant writer, but I think we have finally found a formula that gets him excited about writing. Some time doing something with a little bit of art and creativity seems to get his ideas going. While he was looking for foods to cut out, we talked about what he would say. We’ve been learning about compound sentences and transitional words, so I encouraged him to have at least one example of that in his writing. He happily wrote out his chef introduction to his Thanksgiving meal.

I hope this idea will help encourage some other budding writers!