8 Crafts To Preserve Your Child’s Handprints & Footprints

As parents, we have our days when we can’t wait until our children are old enough to take care of themselves and not need to depend on us for so much. However, there is also that big part in our hearts that wants them to stay little for as long as possible. These 8 hand print crafts will help to preserve those memories of their younger days and how small they really were. Who knows, maybe one of these would make a great Mother’s Day gift as well (hint, hint)! All of these kids craft projects use handprints.

Looking for more Handprint crafts? Check out these Handprint articles we wrote previously. You may want to purchase a ready-made kit for a handprint keepsake too.

1- Handprint Apron from Little Page Turners

2- Love You Hand Prints from Lil Luna

3- Sunshine Keepsake Print from The Realistic Mama

4- Salt Dough Footprint Heart from Hub Pages

5- Thumbprint Family Tree from Day 2 Day Supermom

6- Handprint Bouquet from Wallfry

7- Hand Shaped Ring Dish from Mama Papa Bubba

8- Handprint Cupckae Card from I Heart Arts N Crafts

Looking for more salt dough projects? check these salt dough crafts out on our sister site Craftbits.com

If you are looking for an airdrying clay as an alternative I highly recommend Das Airdrying white clay I have been using it for over 30 years and it never fails me.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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