Children have made Valentine’s Day significantly more fun for me. Both as a nanny and parent, it’s been fun to incorporate that theme into some of our day to day activities and make some keepsake crafts that I’ve been genuinely happy to put on display. I wanted to collect some of our favorites from this year to share with you all in one place.
All of the activities are suitable for toddler and preschool aged children. Several of the crafts would also appeal to school aged children. They’re ones that I imagine we’ll return to each year with new inspiration and skill sets.
Color Sorting—We did the same color sorting activity as at Christmas time with yogurt cups and painted pasta. The boys really enjoy practicing scooping with spoons and pouring from cup to cup.
Threading—We also used the colored pasta to practice threading with pipe cleaners. They enjoyed making bracelets out of these.
Heart Suncatchers—We tried some of the contact paper suncatchers last year and that worked okay. But they were a little bit cloudier than I preferred and I wanted to try them again. This year we used self-laminating sheets and I much preferred the outcome of that method. We cut out the center of a heart doily to give it a definitive heart shape and then filled it in with tissue paper cuttings.
Inverted Heart—We had quite a bit of tissue paper left over from the above activity, so we made another decoration and practiced using glue sticks. Tip: If you save the inside heart, it makes for a sweet, simple little painting project to give as Valentines.
Popsicle Stick Frames—I made the frames for the boys ahead of time with hot glue and popsicle sticks and then they helped to decorate them with sequins. Super simple, but I loved the way this one turned out!
Painted Wooden Hearts—I love these little wooden gift tags from Hobby Lobby as toddler canvases. We did some stars and circles at Christmas time and made some heart ones to hang up for Valentine’s Day.
Valentine Bags—I loved delivering Valentines when I was younger and pretending they were “real mail”. I made these mail bags for our family for two reasons. First, because Graham also likes to play post man and deliver mail and I wanted to give him a place to do that. Second, I thought it would be fun to keep valentines in there from each year so they get unearthed again every Valentine’s Day.
Valentine Greeting Cards—I made another batch of greeting cards for your little ones to decorate and share.
One Comment
Barney Bendler
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