A couple of months ago Miss O’s teacher sent home a note about the 100th day of school. This was before the holidays and, I’ll be totally honest, it got put aside and forgotten.
Thankfully, her teacher has been doing this long enough to know we’d need a reminder, or several reminders.
Still, while it was in the back of my mind, I didn’t make note of the actual due date of this assignment. It turns out, it was last week. This realization came to me on Sunday night and the rest of our week was an overscheduled mess… perfect timing as always.
Monday I saw pictures posted on our school’s Facebook group of other kids’ projects. Of course some were adorable, and some were a little too perfect to have been done by a 4-year-old. I knew I wanted to do something fun and something that Miss O could do mostly by herself.
Here’s what we did.
I mixed up a 5 different paints and laid down some newspaper. I taped down the poster board so that would be one less thing to worry about. Next I handed Miss O the paintbrush and had her paint her hand, then I did the other one.
She pressed her hands down – it takes a lot of concentration – and I gave her a little help making sure her fingers got flat. I’ll admit it was a little hard to see the not-quite-perfect handprints. There are clumps and drips and an extra hand print (don’t try to do one hand at a time). But… this was her project and she loved it.
Technically, the poster itself would have been enough to complete the assignment, but the teacher in me came out. So after the paint dried we sat down and counted to 100 by tens. We labeled each set of hand prints and she was so excited that she made it all the way to 100!
