I love Valentine’s Day. I love pink and red and hearts and candy. I love flowers and butterflies and chocolate and the words “I love you”.
One of my favorites things to do each year is to make Valentines with my kids to give out to their classmates and friends. This year Luca wanted to make something with the hot glue gun and felt. I like simple. This is what we came up with.
Luca and I cut out many many different sized felt hearts and then Luca had fun matching colors up and hot gluing them together. I sewed little safety pins to about ten hearts before I smartened up and used hot glue to attach the rest. We punched two holes in a strip of pink paper for her to sign and pinned the hearts on. Luca wore a pin she made to school so her classmates would know to take the pin off and pin it to their shirts. It was a lot of fun and Luca was very proud of herself! She had so much fun she made them for several other teachers at her school, her bus driver, the librarian….
Lincoln’s Valentines were born out of convenience and ended up being very darling and he had a lot of fun making them. We were sitting at a booth for the preschool I teach at and had many left over craft supplies so he killed his time by coloring puppy puppets. After he finished his fifth one my friend said, “you should use those for his Valentines for his class.” I was glad she thought of it because we were able to help him color a few and finish most of them that night. When I got home I printed out some bones for him to sign and glue in the dogs mouth. It was easy to find a printable template, through Google, to make his cute dog Valentine box.
I didn’t get any pictures of the cute Valentines I made with Anna for her preschool class. I found this cute template on Skip to My Lou. We printed the butterflies to cardstock, glued contrasting colored butterfly cut outs to the wings, and used Dum Dums suckers instead of Tootsie Pops. They were darling!
I had a friend ask me why I would take so much time to make Valentines when there are so many cute ones you can buy at the store. Honestly, if my kids didn’t ask me what we were making each year I probably would just pick some up at the store, but once we get working on them I begin to enjoy the process just as much as they do. It is a fun activity for us to plan and work on together and I am already looking forward to next year!
Whims 