Picture your next staff meeting.
Your director calls you up to the table, grabs your wrist, and paints your hand yellow, red, blue, green, orange, and brown. She presses it onto a piece of paper, sends you to the sink, and calls up the next teacher.
The next day she glues on an eye and a beak she cut out the night before. Then she mails it to your mom.
Your mom tapes it to the fridge. “You made this?!”
You... sort of? (You mostly remember the cold paint.)
I know this scene by heart. I was the one holding the paintbrush.
When I did in-home child care, my favorite day of the month was when the themed curriculum kit showed up in the mail. November meant the turkey handprint, and the kit came with every beak already cut out. Zero prep! My two-year-olds made the cutest turkeys. (Let’s be real, I created it for them.)
So when I started teaching preschool, I brought the turkey with me. I called each child over, sat them down, and painted their hand yellow, red, blue, green, orange, and brown. I guided their hand onto the paper. The next day, they came back to glue on the eye and beak I had already cut out.
One child looked at their finished turkey and asked, “What is that?”
“It’s a turkey for Thanksgiving!”
That child handed me one of the biggest AHA moments of my whole early learning career. The turkey wasn’t for them. So who was it for?
The parents. It was always for the parents.
I scrapped the turkey handprint after that. In all the years since, not one child has asked me to help them make one. (I wrote a whole chapter about it in my book, I’m Not Getting Them Ready For Kindergarten. It’s called “That’s Not a Turkey.”)
Families still get a gift, though. A better one. Their child’s exact words about their grown-up. Their voice telling a made-up story that Grandma can play for the next 20 years. A photo of their real hands, muddy and painty, in the middle of the block tower that took them all morning.