Thanksgiving Challenge

I'm a sensory learner. I gain something from listening and reading, but I understand it best by actively doing it. I like to build our Christian faith in our home with my husband through activities that engage our children as much as possible. I started a Jesse Tree tradition from before our first child was even born and began last year a more visual and engaging celebration of Lent. We've incorporated thanksgiving in our children's personal prayer time and in our normal weekly family celebration of the Lord's Day. It's certainly a regular part of our lives, but I haven't done much yet to particularly prepare our family for Thanksgiving in November. Since thanksgiving is so very important to our relationship with Christ Jesus, I'm missing a fantastic opportunity. So this November 1 through Thanksgiving Day we will have a basket set out with scraps of colored paper nearby to write down things we are thankful for.
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My basket is one I've kept random tea bags in until recently. I'm hoping we will quickly outgrow it and need to upgrade to a bigger basket. Nearby are strips of paper I cut out in traditional fall colors: orange, red, yellow. Our family challenge is to count up as many blessings as we can to fill up that basket. My kids are familiar with filling a jar with buttons or a "manger" with "hay" for other seasons and the buttons at Easter transforming into candy. If we need a little motivation to grow in thankfulness, I just might drop some hints that the basket could be filled with candy but no higher than we've filled it with thankfulness by the 22nd... The basket will be available throughout the day, every day, but we will also take the opportunity at mealtimes to talk about blessings we've received during our day and write them down as a family. For those who are still learning to write, a drawing is just as good as a word.
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We have a fair number of guests. That number will be unusually small this November, but we'll still have a couple friends over each week who I babysit, my sister each week who babysits for us, and maybe a couple guests over for a meal at some point. We like to include guests in our family, so we might get some extra help in filling our basket. But even if it's just the four of us and we average only one written blessing each day, we should have at least 88 blessings written out over the course of our challenge. Yet I'm hoping to get that number closer to 300.
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Linked to Works for Me Wednesday and Simple Lives Thursday and Fellowship Friday and Modest Monday