Valentine's Activities--How much is a Heart Worth, Broken Heart Alphabet Matchching Game, Heart Art, Making Valentine's

Happy Valentine's Day!! We've been having fun the last week doing some Valentine-inspired activities. I thought I'd just do one post about them. I picked up Clifford's Valentines at the library and Andy read it to us. After reading about how Clifford made his big Valentine, we decided to make some of our own.

Every year we enjoy making Valentine's for Aunts and Uncles. This year I was inspired by a card I saw on Putti Prapancha. Here is the front of the card. Since we were making so many, we decided to just use a half sheet of paper for each Valentine to conserve paper.

I made a heart template that we laid over the card and we used a pencil eraser to stamp different colors into the heart shape.

When the heart was completely stamped, we took off the template and had a colorful heart on our card.

After making two cards, it was taking FOREVER so we decided to use our extra large pencil to make the stamps. It worked much better for us. The boys wrote an I and U on the side of the heart to complete the front of the card.

The boys took turns writing on the back of the cards. On a couple they wrote things they loved about their Aunt/Uncle. On others they wrote Happy Valentine's Day.

I was especially proud of Luke for how hard he worked writing on the back of the cards. For just turning 5 years old, he is doing really good at his writing.

 We were also inspired by a fun idea from I Can Teach My Child using broken hearts to make an alphabet matching game. I made a template of hearts in which each heart contained the capital letter on the left side and lowercase on the right side. After cutting out each heart, I cut a zig-zag line through the middle to make it a puzzle.

We laid all the capital letters out on the table while keeping the lowercase letters in a pile to the left. Luke took the top lowercase letter on the pile and matched it up with the capital letter. I put my template in a PowerPoint document which you can download HERE. I was worried it looked a little distoted so if you want each individual page in PDF format I can email them to you, just leave your email address in a comment below.

We also worked on Math with this What's a Heart Worth worksheet I found at Mrs. Wheeler's First Grade Tidbits. You can stop by her website to download the worksheet and check out more of her fun ideas. I picked up the little hearts in the Target dollar section and labeled each one with numbers 1-9. For my preschooler I filled each heart with a different number of pennies for him to count. For my first grader I filled them with pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters for him to count.

After counting the coins in a heart, they recorded the amount on the worksheet in the corresponding box.

We also read about the history of Valentine's Day by reading Valentine's Day by Kathryn A. Imler. If I'm being completely honest, I don't think my kids really care about why we have Valentine's Day, but I certainly learned a lot.  :)

We finished off our Valentine's week by making some abstract Valentine's Art. We used our dollar section Target hearts again as a heart stamp and pressed them all over a sheet of paper in red and pink.

While the paint was still wet, Luke sprinkled red and pink glitter all over the hearts.

After dumping off the excess glitter, we used the leftover red and pink paint and an old toothbrush to splatter some paint all over the paper. It looks so pretty glued onto a red background.

I know it's hard to see how pretty the glitter looks in a picture, but it's vibrant and beautiful!

Hope you have a Happy Valentine's Day!!

Happy Crating!