CraftdotThanksgiving Cootie Catcher: Three Free Printables, Jokes and Thankful Questions
Three Thanksgiving cootie catchers in one free PDF: eight jokes, eight thankful questions, and a blank one to fill in. Letter and A4, no signup.
No email or signup. Printing instructions are below.
On this page
Fold one of these and you are holding a Thanksgiving cootie catcher with eight jokes hidden under its flaps, ready for whoever picks a number first. There are three in the file: one with jokes, one with thankful questions for around the table, and one left blank to fill in. One sheet of paper each, scissors, about ten minutes.
Download: Thanksgiving cootie catcher, free PDF, Letter + A4. No signup, no email.
What you need
- The PDF
- One sheet of ordinary printer paper per catcher. Thin is right for this one. The last couple of folds go through several layers at once, and card stock will fight you and win.
- Scissors
- A pencil, if you are printing the blank one
- About ten minutes
What is in the file
Six pages, three toys. Pages 1 to 3 are the three catchers on US Letter, and pages 4 to 6 are the same three on A4. Print the ones that match your paper.
Page 1 is the jokes catcher, with FEAST, GRAVY, ROAST and TABLE on the four corners. Page 2 is the thankful questions, with THANK, SHARE, SMILE and CHEER. Page 3 is blank in the middle: the numbers, the flap words left off, and eight empty wedges waiting for whatever a child wants to put in them.
On every page the dashed line around the outside of the square is the only line you cut. Every solid line inside it is a fold: the two midlines, the two diagonals, and the diamond joining the middles of the four edges. Under each square the sheet carries its own reminder of which way up to fold it.
How to print it
- Print only the pages that match your paper. Letter is pages 1 to 3, A4 is pages 4 to 6.
- Set Actual Size, not Fit to Page. Fit to Page shrinks the square by a few percent, and the toy quietly stops matching anyone else's.
- Everything is black and white, and the busiest page is 3.9% ink, so a stack for the whole table will not dent the cartridge.
- To check, lay a ruler along one side of the square: 176 mm, about 6.9 inches, on either paper.
How to fold it
The folds are easy. The only one people get wrong is step 4, so read that one twice.
- Cut out the square along the dashed line. The dashed outline is the only cut. Leave every solid line alone; those are folds.
- Fold the square in half, crease, unfold. Then in half the other way, crease, unfold.
- Fold corner to corner, crease, unfold, both ways. Optional, but every later fold lands easier on a ready-made crease.
- Turn the sheet printed side down. Blank side up, writing against the table. It feels wrong, and it is what puts every word the right way up in the finished toy. If one of these has ever come out blank on the outside for you, this was the missing step.
- Fold each corner in so its point lands on the centre, where the creases cross. Press all four flat. The four words are looking back at you now, with the eight numbers around them.
- Flip the whole thing over. The jokes are face up on this side.
- Fold each corner to the centre again. The numbers come back up facing you, and the four words go underneath, where they become the outside of the finished catcher.
- Fold it in half so the numbers end up inside.
- Slide your thumbs and first fingers into the four word pockets and pinch. The catcher opens one way, then the other. Work it a few times to soften the creases.
How to play it
One of you runs the catcher, the other picks. They choose one of the four words; you spell it out, one pinch per letter, opening the catcher one way, then the other. They pick one of the four numbers showing inside; you count it out the same way. They pick a number once more, and you lift that flap and read out what is underneath.
All four words on each catcher are five letters long, so every turn takes the same five moves and nobody can say it was rigged. The joke under flap 5 is joke 5: What kind of key will not open any door? A turkey.
The one with the questions
The second catcher plays exactly the same way, and what comes out from under the flap is a question rather than a joke. Things like what small thing made you happy this week, or who you would want to say thank you to today, or what you can do now that you could not do last year.
It is an easier way into that conversation than going round the table one by one, because the toy picks and nobody has to volunteer. If it stalls, hand it to the youngest person and let them run it.
Fill in the blank one
The third page is the same toy with nothing written in the middle. Print it, write a fortune or a question in each of the eight wedges before you fold anything, then fold as above.
Write first, then fold. Writing into the finished toy means working in a folded pocket the size of a stamp, and it is a fiddle nobody enjoys. If a child is doing the writing, put the sheet flat on the table and turn the paper rather than their wrist, so each wedge faces them as they get to it.
More for the season
If you are already printing for the table, our thankful turkey printable is the same idea in a different shape: a paper turkey with eight blank feathers to write on and glue behind it, and a no-scissors page for younger hands.
For something quieter to put beside the plates, the Thanksgiving word searches in large print are three puzzles with answer keys, set in letters big enough to read without hunting.
The fold itself turns up all year. The Halloween cootie catcher and the Christmas cootie catcher are the same square with their own season's jokes and fortunes in them, and the paper fortune teller template is the plain version with every wedge left to you.
Everything we make is on the free printables page, and none of it needs an email address.
Common questions
What is the difference between the three cootie catchers in the file?
They are the same fold with different things written inside. The first holds eight Thanksgiving jokes, ready to print and play straight away. The second holds eight thankful questions, the sort you can ask around a table, like who you would want to say thank you to today. The third is blank, with the numbers and fold lines printed but the eight middle wedges left empty, so a child can write their own. Print one of them, or all three.
Why do some of the jokes look upside down on the printed sheet?
Because they are meant to. Two of the eight look upside down on the flat sheet and four read sideways, since each one is turned to face out of its own wedge of the middle diamond. Once the toy is folded, every joke reads the right way up to whoever lifts the flap. Fold it before you decide the printer got something wrong.
Will it print the same size on Letter and A4 paper?
Yes. The square is a fixed 176 mm on a side, about 6.9 inches, on every page in the file, so whichever paper your printer holds, the same toy comes out. The setting that matters is Actual Size rather than Fit to Page, because Fit to Page shrinks the square by a few percent. To check a print, lay a ruler along one side of the square: 176 mm on either paper.
