Hanimals*

Every Monday Peter comes home with five books in his backpack. They are called Baggy Books. They get their catchy little name from the fact that all five books are in a Ziploc bag.

Two of the books are at his reading level and I have to listen to him read them.

The other three books are more advanced and he is supposed to listen to me read them. This is part of his kindergarten homework.

Yesterday we pulled out the final book for the week.

I was a little perplexed when I looked at it.

It was a PICTURE book. Good, I thought. We will be done with this in no time.

But as we flipped through the pages I knew I was in for an art project.

The title of the book was Hanimals. And the pictures inside were of hands that had been painted to look like animals.

Hands painted to look like animals – Hanimals. Get it?

Of course Peter wanted to paint his hand to look like one of the Hanimals.

So we got out the paint and I told him to pick an easy one.

He picked the squid. Easy enough even for a non-painter like me!

I mixed black, white, blue and green and I think I got pretty close to the color in the picture.

Then I painted his hand. We had to get out the hair dryer to speed things up a little because we were due at a play date in 30 minutes.

Then I painted white dots and black dots to look like the suction cups.

(Look how happy he is! Sometimes a little unplanned activity and a lot of mess can go a long way to brighten a kid’s day. I’ve got to remember this.)

Then we used a little Elmer’s glue to glue a googly eye on his hand.

Pretty cool, huh? I used regular washable paint so it came right off THREE HOURS later. He wouldn’t wash it off until we showed Daddy.

Here are a few other sample pictures from the book. In case you are inspired to paint your kid’s hands.

View Full Album

A whole gallery of Hanimals can be found here.

*Unfortunately this book is out of print but I did find a few used copies for sale on Amazon.com.

The creator of the book and all of the Hanimals is Mario Mariotti and the photographer is Roberto Marchiori. The book we were looking at was printed by Green Tiger Press and the copy write date was 1980.