Summer is here, and at my library we’re celebrating with fun weekly programs for school-aged kids. We recently recreated an activity we’ve done in previous years, inspired by prehistoric cave paintings. After an ice breaker and a brief introduction to different cave painting sites and what they might represent, we decorated one of our meeting room walls with our own hand prints!
I used scrap paper so as to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and provided coloring supplies and scissors. Multiple studies have shown that children are entering school without scissor skills, so I try to work fine motor skills practice into my programs whenever possible. In this instance, children traced their hands on the the paper, decorated them, cut them out and pasted them to the “cave wall” – so much skills practice in one activity! As expected, many of the children initially asked me to help them cut out their paper hands, but with a bit of encouragement and modelling, they were all able to complete the task independently. I reinforce progress and practice over perfection, so as long as the shapes were cut out in some fashion, that was great! If kids wanted me to help them with any finer details after making the initial cuts themselves, I was happy to help. And if any (paper) finger tips were lost in the process, there was always tape to patch things up. We can do hard things together, I always like to say.
It was fun to talk about how we might decorate the hands to represent our unique personalities, likes and interests – you can see an “Among Us” crew member and the pokemon character “Psyduck” pictured on hands above!
What does summer programming look like at your library?