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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