Handprint Coasters

It's been a little while now, but I wanted to share a crafty post about how the kids in my daughter's preschool class said thank you to their teachers at the end of the year.  I had a lot of fun doing this project with them and the results turned out quite well.  Plus the teachers loved them.  (Win-win-win!)

The main teacher in the class was moving to Michigan with her family when school finished, so I had "small" and "easy to pack" going through my brain as I was thinking of ways to say thank you.  And I think these coasters fit both of those criteria.

My inspiration started when I saw this post on another blog about making tile coasters using rubber stamps to create the images.  I combined that idea with a refrigerator magnet craft from way back that I remember my sister-in-law making with her kids for our mother-in-law.  The combination of those ideas turned out like this.

I got the tiles at Home Depot--9 for about $5.  Then with my own stash of acrylic paints, I let each kid choose an insect to "stamp" using their fingertips.  I had to keep a good record of who made what insect on which tile, and have a supply of baby wipes for quick clean up.
After the paint dried, I took a fine point sharpie and added the legs, face, and other details plus the kid's names to the tiles.
Then I used some clear sealant spray (also from Home Depot) to give a protective finish to the tile.
When the sealant had dried, I put squares of adhesive backed felt on the bottom of each tile.  That way the tiles wouldn't scratch any surfaces when they were used as coasters.
Here's a set of four.  17 kids meant 4 bugs on a tile and one with 5 bugs. 

Then I bundled up each set.  We made two sets of these; one for the teacher and one for the assistant teacher.

Here's one of the teachers opening up her package with some of the students after their graduation.  They seemed to really like the coasters.  And the kids loved pointing out the insects they made.

While I was having the kids stamp their fingers, one of the other mom's was taking pictures and interviewing the kids for a fill-in-the-blank thank you note.  It just happened to be the mom of the two cute bookends in this picture with our little girly.  (Yea, I know.  How do you tell those two apart?  Thankfully they had different hair lengths!)

This other mom told me that she wasn't a scrapbooker, but I think she just hasn't yet accepted her inner scrapbooker self, because the book of pictures and thank you notes she created was amazing.  When we started these projects, we shared ideas of how something like this could look and my idea was MUCH simpler.  She did a great job and the books looked so nice.  Definitely another nice memory for the teachers.  It was also fun to do these thank you gifts with her.  We had quite the assembly line going for the kids to work through during their center time.

When we told the kids what we were making, I explained it as a "super secret special surprise for their teachers".  And every time the boy in the white shirt in the photo above saw me after that, he would announce in a big voice that he hadn't told his teachers about the surprise.  Way to keep it on the down low kid! :)  It did make me laugh though.  Preschoolers can be so funny--not to mention unpredictable!