This activity is definitely for the whole family.

How is your family doing in the quarantine? Although we are all trying to stay positive, with all the surprises and news everyday, I am sure you sometimes have a moment of being the most pessimistic person in the world with complaints pouring out.

When this moment comes, I only allow myself to complain a few minutes. After a few minutes of complaining and being sad, I stop, take a breath and quickly try to redirect my attention to the good things in the life or the things that I am grateful for. I guess, being grateful is really a practice and a habit.

One day, I went out to my backyard, taking a break from work, and saw my husband trimming trees. There were some nice tree branches on the ground and I thought about what I could do with them.

If you have some branches you can use in your backyard, try this activity. You can collect branches from a nature walk, too.

Painting Tree Branches

Set up a table with tree branches, paints and paintbrushes. I recommend using acrylic paints as they are more opaque and the result colours will be more vivid.

Tip: If you only have tempera paints, just use them. Not a big problem. It’s really about the action of painting itself. Tempera paints give colours, too. You will see from my coloured branches later.

Let your child paint some branches that they like. Painting 3D objects is just fun!

After finishing painting, spread the painted branches on a big piece of paper or on a newspaper. Let them dry.

Making Gratitude Notes

Make some paper shapes out of cardstock papers.

Talk about gratitude with your child. Say what you are grateful for and ask what s/he is grateful for. Elaborate on them. It’s an opportunity to practice thinking skills and speaking skills, expand vocabulary, learn the sense of time and many more.

Choose simple representing words and write them on your paper shapes.

Tip: You can make some extra shapes to add more words later.

Make a hole on each paper shape.

Put your painted tree branches in a vase and hang the gratitude words on the branches.

Add more branches and words as needed.

How about having a “gratitude tree check time” as a family ritual for every morning or every evening? It will give a chance to reflect and have a family time.

Have fun!

Missangela🎀