By Heather Melton, UTO Staff Officer 

As our sights turn toward fall, we are so ready to help you add a gratitude this autumn with all new materials. All of the materials for fall can be found here. One of the biggest changes is that while our materials are designed and intended to be used in November, they can be used for any 30-day period that works for you. 

We’ve created brand new materials for families/children, including a thanksgiving tree and a weekly discussion page (scientifically based) to help teach gratitude practices to children. We’ve updated and expanded resources on talking about the history of Thanksgiving with kids. Thanks to one of our amazing UTO coordinators, we’ve even added a new book recommendation for older kids. You can find the resources for the history of Thanksgiving here. We’ve also added a free fill-in-the-blank card to help your child give thanks for the people in their lives and let them know why they are special to them. This is a great activity to do while preparing to gather on Thanksgiving.

For adults, we’ve got an all-new gratitude journal that centers around weekly themes to help individuals practice gratitude and see how it connects to wellness. Due to the popularity of our Lenten text messages, we’ve also created a 30-day text message with a daily prompt to help center your day on gratitude, which is also available as a downloadable calendar. You can sign up for the text message service here.

If you are wanting to use these materials for your whole congregation, we’ve also got you covered. We’ve created faith formation (or children’s sermon) materials to wrap around the Thanksgiving Tree Activity that goes along with the text messages or calendar for adults. We’ve created bulletin inserts you can use to direct folks to all the November materials as well as liturgical resources that congregations can adapt and use in November.

Want to add prayer and/or conversation to your table for Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, or another group meal? We’ve also got free downloadable resources for those events as well. To start, we’ve created two sets of gratitude conversation dice to help change up the “what are you grateful for” conversation around your table (set one decides the question and who answers, while set two has a question for the person who rolled and one for the group), place cards, and prayers you can use to help give thanks for the blessings each person has experienced in the past year. All are formatted with fall leaves so they can be used anytime this fall, not just on Thanksgiving. (And the dice are simply in UTO blue for use any time of year!)

We hope you enjoy these materials. We’ll also have daily posts during November on social media to help you keep the gratitude journey going throughout the fall.