Turkey Hand and Foot Print Activity

I don’t do a lot of adult focused activities, but each fall I do allow myself a satisfying product activity. I love doing the turkey hand and foot print activity because it captures how my children grow each year. This activity is simple, adorable, and if Thanksgiving is your thing, festive. I generally try to keep the activities I have shared with you all open ended. So forgive me for this one. Your children are young though, so you have many more years to do other activities with them.

Supplies

Just like any standard art project, the supplies for this can be pretty minimal. It’s mostly paint supplies. Not listed below, you will need water to rinse your paintbrushes between use.

Red Paint

You will need enough red paint to cover each of your child’s hands one time. No need to get super fancy or difficult here.

Yellow Paint

For the yellow paint, you need the same quantity of red paint.

Orange Paint

You also need a small amount of orange paint. I am listing this as its own color, but mixing red and yellow to make orange is a wonderful option as well, and you can talk about how to mix colors.

Brown Paint

Similar to the orange paint, you don’t absolutely have to buy brown. If you have the colors t mix together and make brown on your own, that is a great alternative.

White Paper

The number of sheets of white paper you will need depends directly on the size of your child. I think I got away with 2 why my babies were… well… babies. But around 3 and 4, I started needing closer to 5 pieces of paper.

Black Paper

The black paper is optional, but I like to suggest it because the finished look is so satisfying to me. It will be used for mounting the turkeys on when done.

Paintbrush

I know this is going to sound weird, but make sure to select a sensory satisfying paint brush. Something large enough that it doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time to paint your child’s hand, but soft enough that it is pleasant.

Paint Tray

You may want a little paint tray, although honestly a paper plate works just as well in my opinion. But somewhere you can splash a glob off paint. I personally use plastic egg cartons.

Glue

This can be stick glue or wet glue. I personally prefer wet glue because my stick glue never lasts very long. Use whatever you like most though.

Scissors

These don’t need to be anything fancy, and there is a good chance you already have a pair of scissors. But be prepared to do some cutting.

Construction Paper - Red and Orange

You need the tiniest bit of orange and red construction paper to finish out your turkeys. I will say, since I already have the paint, I have also painted paper in the past to meet this need.

Googly Eyes

Have I ever told you how much I absolutely love googly eyes? So of course anywhere I can add them, I will.

Process

Paint your child’s hands one of the 3 warm colors. I often do both hands, so then there is room for a mistake. Print their hand print onto paper with spread fingers. You will now have two hand prints, one of each hand. Wash your child’s hands.

Repeat this process until you have 4 total prints of each hand, one in orange, one in yellow, one in red, and one in a light brown shade. These hands will be your feathers. Set them aside for now to dry.

Next you are going to paint their feet brown, which acts as the body of the turkey. Make two more foot prints and set aside to dry. While things are drying this is a really great time to wash your child and your supplies. You want everything fully dried before the next step.

With everything dry, it’s time to start cutting. You want to cut as close to the paint as you are comfortable with, making each individual finger stick out. You will end with 8 little hand prints and 2 footprints. Pair all the left prints together and all the right prints together.

Using the footprint as the body of the turkey, have the toes point down and the heal is the head. Using the glue, carefully glue each of the hand prints behind the body of the with the fingers spread out and overlapping each other. Add a googly eye and a tiny orange beak and a little red wattle. Leave to dry!

Results

In the end you get a cute, dorky little turkey. I love mounting it on black paper because it makes the colors pop more, but that is optional, obviously. My favorite is to do this year over year so that you can compare each year to the previous one. It’s a cute, simple way to watch your little one grow up!