Materials
None
Instructions
1. On a warm, sunny day, take the children outside and spread out a long piece
of bulletin board paper or poster board.
2. Ask the children to take off their shoes.
3. Pour tempera paint onto paper plates. (Use liquid tempera paint because it is
not as slippery as other paints, such as fingerpaint.)
4. One at a time, ask the children to come up and step into the paint.
5. Once the bottoms of their feet are covered sufficiently with paint, ask them to
"pitter patter" across the paper.
6. For best results, encourage all the children to run across the paper using the
same color, then go back and do it again using a different color.
7. Help the children wash their feet in the washbasin.
8. In the end you will have a really cute and colorful "collage" of footprints. And
the children love it, too!
More to do
For a less messy and easier version of this activity, encourage the children to
make footprints using plain water on a sidewalk.
Math: After the paint dries, use a ruler to measure the footprints. Who has the
biggest foot? Who has the smallest foot? Can you count all five toes on each
footprint? Can you tell if a print is from the left foot or the right?
