Weekend Fun: Flamingo Prints
Flamingos are tall, graceful tropical birds noted for their salmon pink color. Their feathers turn that color because of the shrimp that they eat.
In this one-minute video, you can watch male flamingos in Argentina do a dance. Although they dance together in a big cluster, each one hopes that one of the females will notice him and become his partner for life.
Flamingos feature in several popular children’s books. One of our favorites is Molly Idle’s Flora and the Flamingo, which is a wordless treasure that tells a story with illustrations only of a girl and a flamingo who learn to dance together.
Make a flamingo out of your handprint!
What you need
- Paintbrush or sponge
- Black marker
- Orange or yellow crayons or markers
- Paper plate or cardstock (white or a light color)
- Pink or salmon or white paint*
- Optional: googly eye and glue
What you do
- Use a brush or sponge to apply paint to your hand. *If you don’t have pink paint, mix a little red or orange paint into some white paint. You can try red or orange food coloring if you don’t have the paint.
- Make a handprint on the paper plate or cardstock. *If you don’t have the right colors of paint, make a white handprint and color it pink with your crayons!
- Use finger to draw head and neck with paint.
- Use orange or yellow crayons or markers to draw the flamingo’s legs. Notice that its knees bend the opposite way from human legs.
- When the paint is dry, use glue to attach a googly eye or use the black marker to draw an eye and other details.
