Twice a month I volunteer at my church organizing an activity for girls ages 8-12. It’s set up kind of like girl scouts, so we have goals we work on each meeting to help the girls pass off certain skills. When I heard about The Little Yellow Duck Project,I knew my girls would love making duck themed items and hide them around town. And since we’re always looking for new ways for them to cross off their service requirements, it seemed like the prefect activity!
Last week we organized the girls into an assembly line (complete with cutting station, duck punch station, gluing station and ribbon tying station) and went to work. They did such a great job and after an hour they’d made up about 40 bookmarks! I handed out a few to each girl to take home and hide. They were so excited, and they each begged for the left over bookmarks so they could have an extra to hide!
In my experience, getting a group of young girls to finish a project can take forever. Especially if it involves cutting things out. (I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got a few girls who will take the entire hour cutting out 3 or 4 pieces of paper!) There’s definitely been a huge learning curve for me when it comes to getting these girls to actually finish something in an hour- let alone getting 40 of anything completed! To speed the process along, I printed the cut lines on each paper so each shape could be easily cut out with my paper cutter by simply cutting along each line. (Measuring or tracing would have taken forever- trust me! Been there, done that.) It worked great.
For the ducks, I found a duck shaped paper punch on ebay (here is a similar one
The bookmarks are super easy to make. The back of the bookmarks double as the information tags so the person who finds it knows where to go to find the Little Yellow Duck Project website. The fronts feature a quote about acts of kindness, which is what this project is all about so it seemed fitting. I uploaded the files I used in case you’d like to make your own- it makes a quick, easy way to participate in the project!
For my bookmarks I used four files, but you could easily simplify the design by using just the first two. Just print these images right onto your scrap booking paper (they are designed for 8.5×11 sheets) and cut away. Here’s what’s available:
- The Back pieces have all The Little Yellow Duck Project information so people can find the website.
- Cut and paste the Quote piece to the blank side of the Back and you can be done. OR-
- You can add an additional pop of color with these pre-measured Backgrounds (we used the gray polka dotted paper for these in most of my example- I think there is one rebel chevron one that snuck in there!)
- Additionally, you can add the Small square for a little more detail (these are chevron squares behind the ducks in my example)
To finish ours off, we punched a whole in the top of each bookmark and tied a 6″ bit of ribbon on. Easy enough that the girls (mostly 8 and 9 year olds) in my group were able to make them with no problem! I hope they make a fast, easy Summertime project for you as well.