Adorable Paper Roll Turkey Craft

Here’s a fun Thanksgiving turkey craft for kids, and you probably already have the materials you need!

Turn paper towel rolls or toilet paper rolls into adorable turkeys that will make great decorations this Thanksgiving.

This post was originally published in November 2016 and updated in November 2025.

Homeschooling has kind of felt like a circus lately. Janie is 2 1/2, and she is an extremely busy personality. She loves to cut and glue and draw with markers and get into chapstick and the boys’ piggy banks and unroll toilet paper and flush things (that’s her newest hobby, and I’ll be watching her like a hawk on that one!!!) and if I don’t keep her busy enough she quickly (and quietly) finds her own things to do. It’s exhausting. Some days, I just have to explain 5th grade math and she just has to look at books or color in a coloring book (and only in a coloring book, and not my planner or the boys’ textbooks) but today, we were able to fit in a couple hands-on preschool activities, and she was a happy girl!

First we made some play dough turkeys, and then we got out paper towel rolls and made those into turkeys too.

Supplies Needed for Paper Roll Turkeys:

Paper towel rolls or toilet paper rolls
Craft feathers – there are tons of options on Amazon, such as these colorful craft feathers
Googly eyes
Red and yellow felt (or construction paper)
Hot glue gun or your favorite craft glue

Three years ago (or maybe 4?) I bought this bag of feathers at Michael’s, and we have sure gotten our money’s worth out of them. For this project, we painted paper towel rolls with brown acrylic paint. I cut the paper towel rolls into about 4 inch sections. Then we decorated the turkeys with googly eyes, felt beaks, and feathers. That’s it!

Owen and I used hot glue to assemble the turkeys, but if younger kids want to do the gluing, Tacky Glue would work well. Elmer’s glue might work also, but Tacky Glue is stronger.

The finished turkeys are so cute!

Janie and Jonathan think they are fun to play with! We are thinking of making them into place cards for Thanksgiving dinner by cutting two slits in the top of the card board tube and then inserting an index card with a name on it.