This post contains affiliate links. If you grab one of the printables I recommend, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
My friend dropped her twins with me for an afternoon in early November and said the word craft like it was a small kindness. It was not. Two five-year-olds, one folding card table, glue sticks rolling off the edge faster than I could catch them. I had printed a stack of things the night before, fanned them out like I knew what I was doing, and within ten minutes there was glue on the chair, glue on the dog, and one twin quietly working her way through the open tube of glitter like it was a snack.
Here is the part I got wrong. I printed the paper turkeys and the thankful garland with the cut-lines on my draft setting, the pale gray ones, and the kids could not see them. They were holding scissors up to nearly invisible dotted lines and just guessing. So I grabbed a marker, went back over every cut-line by hand, darkened the whole batch, and after that they could actually follow them. Lesson logged. Print the cut versions dark, or trace them yourself before the kids sit down.
A lot of these I bought as files from an indie design shop and printed at home on plain copy paper, because kids destroy everything anyway and there is no reason to waste the good cardstock. Some of the links below are affiliate links, so if you grab one I might get a tiny cut. Costs you nothing. Let me show you what held up.
The Coloring Book That Bought Me Twenty Quiet Minutes
This was the first thing I reached for when the glue chaos got out of hand. I printed maybe eight pages of it, clipped them into a cheap folder, and handed one twin a fistful of markers. She went silent. Actual silence, the kind you forget exists.
The pages are simple shapes, big turkeys and pumpkins with thick outlines, which is exactly right for little hands that color in long furious scribbles and not much else. I ran them on regular copy paper and the marker bled through onto the table on the heavier-pressed pages, so put a sheet of scrap underneath if your kids press hard. Mine press hard.
One nitpick: a few of the inside pages have finer detail than the cover suggests, little feather lines that a five-year-old will just plow straight over. Not a problem, but do not expect them to stay in those lines.
Activity Pages For When Coloring Stops Working
Coloring has a shelf life of about fifteen minutes per kid, and then you need a new thing. These activity pages were the new thing. Mazes, a little matching puzzle, a spot-the-difference that the more competitive twin took very seriously.
I printed the whole set in one go and the twins traded pages back and forth, which bought me time to wipe glitter off everything. The maze page in particular held attention way longer than I expected, both of them hunched over it with a pencil arguing about the right path.
The nitpick here is that one or two of the puzzles really need an adult to read the instructions out loud, so it is not a hand-it-over-and-walk-away set. If you have a non-reader, plan to sit close for that part.
A Second Coloring Stack For The Inevitable Second Wind
You will think one coloring set is enough. It is not, not when you have two kids who both want the exact same turkey page at the exact same moment. Having a second set meant I could print duplicates and end the negotiation.
These pages have a slightly different style than the first book, a little more open space, which my friend’s quieter twin actually preferred because she likes filling big areas with one color and calling it done. I taped two of the finished ones to my kitchen window with the light coming through and they looked sweet.
Nitpick: the line weight is a touch thinner than the other coloring file, so on draft print mode some of the outlines came out faint. I bumped to normal quality and they were fine.
The Big Feelings Workbook For The Post-Sugar Meltdown
Somewhere around the glitter incident, the kid who ate the glitter had a full meltdown about a glue stick. Classic afternoon arc. This workbook was not on my craft plan but I had printed a few pages out of curiosity, and it turned out to be the reset button.
There are pages where you point at a face to show how you feel, and simple prompts about big and small feelings. We sat on the floor and did one together while the other twin kept coloring. It pulled her out of the spin better than my snack bribe did.
One nitpick: a fair amount of it is meant to be talked through with an adult rather than handed over, so it is more of a together activity than a quiet solo one. Worth knowing before you print the whole thing expecting independent work.
Dinosaur Affirmations, Because Turkeys Get Old Fast
Not everything at a November craft table has to be turkeys, and honestly by hour two the twins were done with turkeys. These dinosaur affirmation pages were a hard left turn that completely reset their interest.
Each page pairs a dinosaur with a little I-am statement, the kind of thing the louder twin read out in a roar voice, which was genuinely the funniest part of the whole afternoon. I printed a few, they colored the dinosaurs, and the affirmations got shouted around my apartment for the rest of the visit.
Nitpick: the text on a couple of pages sits close to the dinosaur art, so when a kid colors enthusiastically the words get a little buried under marker. If you want the affirmation readable, color the creature first and leave the words alone.
A Feelings Journal That Slid Into The Craft Pile
This one I almost did not include because a journal sounds like homework, not a craft afternoon. But the quieter twin took to it, drawing in the blank spots and answering the prompts with one-word answers and a lot of underlining.
I printed it single sided and stapled it down one edge into a little booklet, and that booklet went home with her. Her mom texted me a week later that she was still drawing in it. That is a win for a fifty-cent print job.
The nitpick: it really wants to be a booklet, not loose sheets, and assembling it mid-craft-chaos with a stapler and glittery hands was its own small ordeal. Staple it the night before.
The Mindfulness Pages I Saved For The Wind-Down
By the end of a craft afternoon you do not want kids more wired, you want them coming down for pickup. I held this workbook back for exactly that, the last twenty minutes before their mom arrived.
The pages have breathing exercises and slow little coloring activities, gentle stuff, and we did the breathe-in-breathe-out one with our hands on our bellies, which they found hilarious for about a minute and then genuinely calming. Both of them were noticeably mellower by the time the door knocked.
Nitpick: some of the mindfulness prompts assume a kid can read short sentences, so for the non-reading twin I read each one aloud. Not a flaw, just plan to be the narrator.
Money Smart Pages For The Kid Who Counts Everything
One twin is the type who counts her crayons before and after to make sure nobody took one. So when I printed a couple of pages from this money workbook, she was instantly in. Coins, simple adding, a little pretend-store setup.
We turned it into a craft side-quest where she colored play coins and we set up a tiny store on the corner of the table that was not covered in glue. It kept her busy and her sister wandered over to play customer.
The nitpick: the coin art is US currency, so if you are outside the States the dimes and quarters will not match what your kid actually knows. The counting logic still works, but the specific coins might confuse a kid who has never seen them.
The Gratitude Journal That Actually Made Them Pause
I did not expect a gratitude page to land with two five-year-olds who had just been fighting over a glue stick, but here we are. I printed a few sheets and we filled in what we were thankful for, and one twin wrote her dog and the other wrote glitter, which, fair.
The prompts are short and the drawing space is big, which is the right ratio for this age. We did it at the very end, calmer, glue mostly contained, and it gave the afternoon a little soft landing before pickup.
Nitpick: it is dated for the year on the cover, so if you are printing it in a later season that front page reads a bit stale. I just skipped the cover sheet and printed the inside pages.
The Easy Bundle I Wish I Had Started With
If I were running that craft afternoon again, I would open this bundle first and print straight from it. It is the simplest of the lot, big friendly shapes, very little detail, the kind of pages a kid can finish and feel proud of instead of giving up halfway.
The twins both did several of these and the finished pile became a thankful garland, which is where my pale cut-line disaster came from. The actual coloring pages are great, low effort and high payoff for little kids.
Nitpick is the one I already confessed: the cut-line versions print very light on draft mode, so the kids could not follow them and I had to darken every line by hand with a marker. Print the cut pages on normal quality, or trace the lines yourself first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is kids thanksgiving break?
It varies by school district, but most kids in the US get somewhere between two and five days off around Thanksgiving, usually the Wednesday before plus the Thursday and Friday of the holiday itself. A lot of districts also tack on the Monday and Tuesday so families can travel.
Which, practically speaking, means you have a long stretch of bored kids to fill, and a stack of printed craft pages goes a surprisingly long way.
Can I print these at home?
Yes, that is the whole point. I printed every single thing in this post on my own tired inkjet on plain copy paper, because kids wreck everything and the good cardstock is wasted on them.
One tip from experience: if a file has cut-lines for a garland or cut-out, print it on normal quality, not draft. The light gray lines vanish on draft mode and the kids cannot see where to cut.
What file formats do these designs come in?
Most of these come as PDFs you just open and send to your printer, which is ideal for a craft afternoon when you do not want to fuss. A few also include image files if you want to drop a page into something else.
For the coloring and activity pages, the PDF is all you need. Hit print and go.
Do I need a Cricut or Silhouette to use these?
No. Everything here is print-and-color or print-and-cut with regular kid scissors. I have a cutting machine sitting in a closet and I did not touch it once during this whole afternoon.
The garland cut-lines are made for a child to follow with safety scissors, so a machine would honestly be overkill. A printer and a marker to darken faint lines is the entire toolkit.
Before You Print
The twins went home covered in glue, slightly glittery, and clutching a stapled feelings journal and a lopsided thankful garland we hung across my bookshelf. Their mom sent a photo of them showing it off at dinner. That is the bar for a craft afternoon, low mess survival and one thing worth taping to a wall.
If you only fix one thing before yours, fix the cut-lines. Print them dark, or run a marker over them while the kids are still finding their scissors, and you will skip the part where a five-year-old hands you blunt scissors and asks where the line went.
