How to Play the Attitude of Gratitude Game with Pick Up Sticks

The gratitude game is all about teaching gratitude to children in a way that is fun!  We play the gratitude game with pickup sticks around Thanksgiving as a way to teach our children to count their blessings for the many great things in their lives. However, you can play this game all year round to encourage lessons of being grateful and to cultivate an attitude of gratitude.

Pick up sticks is a game that you may have played when you were a kid.  With this unique twist on pick up sticks, we offer a unique gratitude game that is easy for kids of all ages to play.  Keep on reading for our Gratitude Game with Pick Up Sticks Tutorial.

Making the Gratitude Game with Pickup Sticks

Another great thing about this game is that you can make a fun time of creating the pieces with your kids. You can really make this game your own from choosing the colors that you want to the materials that you use. For a quick game, you can purchase the pick up sticks game or colored straws that match the colors on your gratitude chart. Or you could get cheap chopsticks or Popsicle wooden sticks to paint. It all depends on how much effort you want to put into creating the game.

Gratitude Game Setup

The game is very simple to play. The gratitude chart will specify which color signifies which category. The colors and categories can be whatever you want!  We defined the colors/categories per below as an example:

• Red: Name a person who you are thankful for.
• Yellow: Name a place that you are thankful for.
• Green: Name a type of food that you are thankful for.
• Blue: Name a thing that you are thankful for.
• White: Name anything that you are thankful for.

You then need to gather your straws or colored sticks that you are using for this game

How to Play the Gratitude Game with Pick Up Sticks

1. Start by holding all of the pick up sticks in your hand.
2. Drop the pick up sticks. Don’t worry if they fall randomly, that’s the point of the game.
3. Each player takes a turn pulling a stick from the pile.
4. An important rule is to not make any other sticks move, otherwise you lose your turn and won’t get the stick.
5. Every time that you pick up a stick, you must name what you are grateful for based on the color of the stick and your categories.
6. The player that has the most sticks at the end of the game wins.

As you can see, this game is very simple to play.

Why Play the Gratitude Game?

The point of the game is to teach gratitude to children while having a fun bonding experience for the entire family. This is a valuable game for people of all ages in your family to play because it allows everyone in the family to consciously think of their gratitude and verbally express it. What better way to teach gratitude than by modeling it for our kids, right? By picking sticks, the player is forced to take a close look at what they are grateful for. For instance, they are grateful for their parents or tacos. 😊 Even the seemingly simplest thing that they are grateful for helps them to better understand the concept of gratitude.

Attitude of Gratitude Game Video Tutorial