By Heather Melton, UTO Staff Officer  

It’s November! If it snuck up on you and you haven’t downloaded your gratitude materials, there’s still time; you can sign up for text messages anytime, print things when you’re ready, and if you’re a faith formation leader, you can still get materials home to families. Here are some things we recommend to add some gratitude to your November.

For families – There’s still time to start your thanksgiving tree or use the weekly discussion page, but if you’re looking to help your child engaging with gratitude for the people in their lives (or gathered for Thanksgiving), we recommend printing out some free fill-in-the-blank cards to help your child share why their family members 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. The quickest thing to do is sign up for the daily text message service here.  You’ll get one text a day with something to consider and give thanks for as you move through the month of November.

For congregations – 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. 

For Thanksgiving Day – 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. 

Finally, you can follow UTO on Facebook and Instagram for daily gratitude prompts that you can like and share on your personal page or your congregation’s. However you decide to add more gratitude into your life this November, know we are very thankful for you.