Valentine’s Day Activities

We’ve been having so much fun spreading the love for Valentine’s Day this year and hope you enjoy some of our ideas for crafts and activities to get the little ones involved! These are all easy to adapt based on skill level so you can try them with your little ones and big ones – they’ll just need more or less help from you depending on their age.

Hand Crafts

We recently went to a story-time at the Curious George store where we made these beautiful little valentines. I thought they were so amazing we decided to make them again at home to share with you all! They are so easy, but so much more fun than traditional cards.

To Make Them:

First cut a strip off the top of a piece of construction paper in a straight line.

Next trace both your child’s hands on the rest of the construction paper and cut them out.

On one hand write I <3 you and on the other write the child’s name.

Write This Much on the strip and then fold it accordion style.

Glue the hands to either side of the strip and it’s ready to give or just to cherish at home.

Hearts/Heart Cards

A pretty classic one, but sometimes it’s classic for a reason! We cut out some hearts and painted them with our valentine’s day colors, I let the kids use whatever they wanted which ended up being paintbrushes, bubble wrap, dot art and chopsticks. Some of these we hung up to decorate around the house and some we folded in half and wrote out messages to give as our valentine’s day cards for whoever the kids wanted to give them to.

Felt Hearts

This was a great one to get my youngest involved – but all three had fun making them! We found a pack of these felt hearts at our local dollar section and decided to make them extra special with markers, glitter and pom-poms! We have these glitter pens that are half paint, half glue so they were perfect for both decorating and sticking pom-poms. Hot glue a magnet to the back and they’d make a great addition to the fridge too!

Mailboxes

If you missed it these were actually the same mailboxes from our letter matching activity during our Numbers and Letters week! I just recovered the letters with fresh paper and made them their initials instead. We then decorated these with some heart stickers, glued on pom-poms or hearts cut out of construction paper and some markers, crayons and paint! It was a great project with lots of features that kept them all busy crafting for a bit longer than we’ve been able to sustain thus far. Each of the kids made a card for each of their siblings throughout the week and we “mailed” them one by one. On Valentine’s Day we’ll all open our mailboxes and read our cards together!

Sensory Table

Around the time that I cleaned up all the christmas decorations in January I started to put away our Christmas sensory play – but decided since it’s still cold and snowy here to leave the snowballs! For February we added some more Valentine’s day themed sensory fun with heart sponges, light up wands – and felt envelopes with felt hearts so that we could practice sending Valentine’s! I also added some fuzzy pipe cleaners that we’ve been working on lacing through the holes of our water table (the ones that make rain in the summer months).

If you’re brave you could even do some red & pink rice, but I like to keep our table accessible at all times and decided I didn’t want to deal with the constantly misplaced rice. We may do this as a separate activity on Valentine’s day with our little tray though!

Books

I just LOVE having some holiday themed books as it makes for a really easy book rotation! There’s nothing like spicing up the bookshelf or rekindling some old favorites by shifting them around once in a while. Even if we only have one book for the particular holiday it’s a great way to help get them excited for whatever’s coming up. Every year I take out our Valentine’s day books toward the end of January and it’s as if I’d gone out and bought a whole new set of books for them. These have been a few of our consistent favorites year after year:

Sensory Week
Numbers & Letters Week: Days 3, 4, & 5

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