Foster mindfulness with the Tree of Thanks bulletin board in your school. Create a hallway bulletin board to share all the things your students are grateful for. The students will also create their own small craft tree to take home and show to their family.
I started a new fall tradition with my class this year centered around mindfulness. This "Thanksgiving Tree" activity is an intentional way to teach my students about the gifts of reflection, mindfulness and gratitude. Plus, it's a great visual to remind them of the many blessings we have.
To start, I passed out a bare tree trunk from the "Tree of Thanks" Craft Kit.
We talked about how the tree looked without its leaves. The students shared out that the tree looked "cold", "sad" and "ugly". Then I used the bare tree as a metaphor and compared it to what a life looks like without any gratitude. We talked about how when we practice mindfulness and appreciation we can add colorful leaves to our tree to make it beautiful and grand. 
The students then began to label their colorful, gratitude leaves using our always reliable 2-Color Sharpie® Fine Point Permanent Markers. We talked about how the leaves represent all the good things we have in life. The class loved this simple mindfulness activity so much that they wanted to create a giant one for the hallway so our neighboring classrooms could participate in the activity too!
To include the other classes, we passed out a few little leaves from the Thanksgiving Gratitude Mason Jar to the different teachers in our hallway. 
The teachers then used the prompts on the leaves during their class meetings to talk about what everyone was thankful for and lead their class into a moment of gratitude. At the end of the week, each class filled out three leaves and returned them to our room to help make a collaborative, hallway gratitude tree bulletin board.
The "Tree of Thanks" Bulletin Board Set was the perfect, larger version of the individual "Tree of Thanks" Craft Kit we did earlier in the week in our class. The students copied each of the other classes' contributions on the leaves from this set. There were 24 leaves in all.
To make the bulletin board, I used the super thick and pliable Better Than Paper® Burlap Bulletin Board Roll as the background. You could also use regular Burlap Fabric as a background too. I then layered my two favorite fall borders: the Orange Double-Sided Solid & Polka Dot Bulletin Board Borders and Schoolgirl Style Lattice Bulletin Board Borders. To add a little fall flair, I used some of the Jumbo Fall Leaves Cutouts as well!
I topped the bulletin board with the adorable and festive Thankful Grateful Blessed Gold Glitter Garland. 
After a week celebrating gratitude and mindfulness, the students wrote thank you notes to someone on campus: a former teacher, friend, the lunch lady, supervisors, aides etc. 
In our classrooms we teach students how to read, write and do math but it's also important to teach them about being a positive community member and friend. We talked about how a simple card or "thank you" can make people feel special and recognized. It was a great week full of mini lessons on important life skills that are easy to apply and can have a vast impact.
