Shelly Lyons
AppleThis is Shelly ’Klingensmith’ Glennon. Shelly teaches fourth grade at Tularcitos Elementary School in Carmel Valley, California. Leslie volunteered in Shelly's first grade classroom for 14 years.

All of this exposure to the first-grade classroom has had a lasting effect on Leslie’s books, not just providing a setting but also making the books very curriculum friendly. Albert’s Field Trip was a direct result of a class field trip. Ms. Klingensmith (Shelly) can be seen (in her Pleasant Valley/rabbit persona) working with the first-graders in Albert’s Birthday. Shelly created these materials and used them in her classroom with great success.

Fingerprint Animals

By Shelly Lyon

If you tried the fingerprints to solve mysteries in October, you might like to try letting the children get more creative with their fingerprints, now. My class found that it was fun to make animals with fingerprints. As always, the children are very inventinve with their artwork.

I introduced the idea of fingerprint animals using Ed Emberley's two books "Fingerprint Drawing Book" and "Great Thumbprints." I let the children try a number of Ed's ideas. Then I took the books away. Next, we looked at photos of animals and tried to simplivy them into the oval shpaes of fingerprints. Then the children took off making their own animal drawings using fingerprintrs as the ovals of their designs.

They came up with marvelous monkeys, horses, and birds, to name a few. I had available the three colored stamp pads that our math projgram provided and that added variety to their prints. I found that having black stamp pads was also a good idea for the purist fingerprinter

Framed and displayed on the walls the fingerprints animals are charming and provocative. All these from a simple fingerprint and a child's complex mind!

Shelly Lyon

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