- paints (tempera, different colors)
- paper towels
- poster paper (large sheet)
- trays (shallow)
- friends
MA Standards:
Speaking and Listening/SL.PK.MA.1: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners during daily routines and play.
Language/L.PK.MA.1: Demonstrate use of oral language in informal everyday activities.
Head Start Outcomes:
Social Emotional Development/Social Relationships: Cooperates with others.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
English Language Arts/Language 2: Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.
Health Education 18: Talk about how people can be helpful/hurtful to one another.
Our Hands
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
Discuss different ways friends work together to get things done. For example, remind children that in Knuffle Bunny Too, the girls’ families worked together by meeting to exchange the bunnies.
- Say, When the girls’ bunnies got switched, their parents cooperated, or worked together, to get the bunnies returned to each girl.
- Ask, What do you think would have happened if the families did not work together?
- Can you name a time when you worked together with someone to solve a problem or to get something done? Did you feel like you were being a good friend when you worked together?
Tell children they are going to work together to make a group piece of artwork.
Lay a large sheet of paper across a table. Demonstrate for children how to dip their hand into the tray of paint and carefully stamp it on the paper.
- Then invite each child to choose a paint color and dip a hand into the selected tray of paint.
- Guide children to work together to put all of their handprints on the same page and create a work of art to hang in the room.
- Ask, How can we work together to make sure there is enough room for everyone’s handprint? Help guide children to cooperate with each other.
Adaptation: Family-based childcare educators and smaller groups may want to have children imprint on individual sheets of small paper and then glue them together on a large sheet of chart paper.