You are my sunshine, my only sunshine..ok, not my only one…but one of the two…

July 25, 2010 at 1:51 PM · Filed under Craft

Craft time!!!

I have a confession to make:

I am a sucker for anything that has my children’s handprints on them.

At first, I was like, “meh…cute craft.”

And into the craft pile it went.

Now…looking back? They’re my absolute favorites! Adam is 6 now, and has grown substantially over the past 18 months. I seriously think he already has man-hands. So, any chance to check out how small* his hands once were…well, its almost as good as smelling a baby’s newborn head. Almost. 🙂

*Yeah, he never really had small hands.

Even as a newborn, they were pretty large.

But, still, much smaller than they are now.

For this craft, you will need:

yellow, orange, construction paper
glue
scissors
paper plates
yellow paint
marker
pen

1. Start by tracing your child’s handprint on a plain white sheet of paper. This will serve as your template. This is the pretty time-intensive part. I traced their hands onto another piece of paper and let them cut that one out, but both boys quickly lost interest in that…so I used the template and cut the rest of them out while they painted.

2. Turn the paper plate over and let the kids paint the entire backside in yellow.

( I line my table with saran wrap while they paint. Saves my table, saves my sanity.)

If they don’t 100% cover every last bit of white, that’s ok. It will still look so sweet in the end.

3. Once the glue is dry, haul out the marker and ask the kids to either draw a smiley face on it, or to draw their own face. I love Adam’s self-portraits now-a-days. It’s fun to see what he sees in himself. 🙂

4. Turn the plate over so the paint side is down. Run a line of glue along the rim and start laying the hand prints on one at a time. Overlapping them results in a really fun look.

I had a few left over papers in orange and green along with a few different colors of yellow. The more variety of color you use, the more fun your sunshine turns out to be!