Hi! I am Debbie and we are going to talk about some really fun activities to do with your young child with their own thumbs, its called thumbprint art. Here are just a few examples: My preferences are the insects and little animals, they are really, really cute. There is a book on the market written by a gentleman named Ed Emberley, it is called The Great Thumbprint Drawing Book. You can buy it on the Internet or at the bookstore, or get it in your library; has tons of examples of things you can do with this with kids. Things that you need to do the thumbprint art are some really good washable stamp pads; they come in a wide variety of colors and you can get them at craft stores anywhere. You need some markers. I prefer a thin permanent marker to do the actual drawing on the thumbprint; just seems to be little cleaner. You are going to need some wipes to wipe their thumb off so that print doesn’t go everywhere else in your house, and on faces or on clothes and some tissues on hand. All right, what you need to do is have a plan; let your child pick them when they want to do. I think we are going to use a spider right now; get your black ink pad. I like to guide the child’s thumb onto the pad and then put it where you wanted it on the paper just so a little more accuracy on where it goes, especially if you are making a gift, so you can just kind of hold their hand and place it. Older children can do it by themselves. And then I usually have one for them to look at while they are designing theirs and I talk them through it; what does spider look like, how many legs does the spider have and its a good opportunity to talk about insects versus arachnids. All spiders have eight legs so we could do the legs first; talk about four on one side and four on the other side. Then our spiders have two eyes; if you are talking about real spiders, most of them having eight eyes, but you can talk about the difference between a goofy spider and a real spider, this is going to be a goofy spider so two eyes, a big smile, and then we can talk about his dragline coming down from his web, so there is an example of a spider. Another fun one to do is the butterfly, that’s always a popular one with the girls. So you are going to do a thumb and then with her pinky, we are going to use a different finger at this time, we are going to make some wings. Again you are probably going to have to help place the pinky where it needs to go. Insects have antennas and what do we use antennas for; good time talk about that. This is a silly insect, so it is going to have a smile and some eyes then you can let your child decorate the wings, when I do insects I like to do little dotted lines that shows where they’ve been flying. All right, let’s do our very grouchy ladybug here. We need to put three, going to give him a little foot, three on this side. Then our ladybug we are going to draw a straight line across in a straight line up and down, can introduce those verticals and horizontal. Ladybugs have symmetrical dots; another good math word you can throw in while you are doing this, and we have a smile, two eyes, insects have antennas, so and there is Miss Lady Bug. Again, I wasn’t going to do my tracks where my ladybug has been flying.
Making Thumbprint Art Frames: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids