I’m so thankful for sweet and patient preschool teachers!  My son loves going to school, which is priceless to me.  Don’t even ask how disappointed he was about not having school the week it flooded here in Houston last month…endless questions about why he couldn’t go!

I thought something that represented each child would be neat to present to the teachers on the last day of class.  Fingerprints seemed like a nice way to go, and the free printable on this site made it easy.

Materials:

• Tree printable (download it here)
• Green ink pad (I used the Craft Smart ink pad in Kelly Green from Michael’s for $3)
• Fine point black sharpie
• 8×10 frame ($8 from Marshall’s!)

If you want to add the school name and/or school years to the bottom of the printable, follow these steps (totally optional!). Using smallpdf.com, I converted the PDF tree printable to a JPG file. Then using PicMonkey.com, I added text to the bottom of the JPG to include the school name and years.  I chose a green color for the text that looked similar to one of the greens in the “teacher” word.  Once happy with that, I saved the updated JPG and converted it back to a PDF using smallpdf.com again.

With the help of another mom, we got all of the kids’ fingerprints done in about 5 minutes and wrote their names as we went along.  Easy peasy!  With a bigger class, this would look even cuter with multiple leaves on each branch.

The last step is cutting the paper down to an 8 x 10 to fit into the frame.  I placed the paper insert from the frame on top of the fingerprint page, made sure it allowed enough space on all sides to not cut anything off, and then lightly traced around it in pencil.  This made cutting with scissors a breeze.  Popped it in the frame and voila!

Part 2 of the teacher gifts is coming up next week – a cute tote bag filled with summer goodies!  Stay tuned!