preschoolerswant2know: Valentine's Day!

It was Valentine's week and the kids had a wonderful time making heart crafts, eating cookies and handing out valentine cards to their friends! We had a Valentine's learning center full of sorting, matching, sequencing, math and science! You can see it in the top tab ' Themed learning centers'.

We did several heart-themed crafts this week, one was a project we had never tried and the kids (and I) were thrilled with the way it turned out!

This is a suncatcher made with translucent pony beads! We placed heart shaped metal cookied cutters on a cookie sheet and then the kids placed the pony beads into the cookie cutter in whatever design they wanted ( one layer). We placed them in the oven at 400 degrees and baked for 30 minutes. We took them out to cool and they made popping sounds as they cooled and released from the pan making it very easy to get them out- no scraping or pulling! I hot glued ribbon to the backs and hung them in the window. I found later that if you place a glass bead in the cookie cutter in the place you will wish to thread the ribbon, the glass bead won't melt leaving a perfect hole ready for hanging!

Valentine Trees! This was a 2 day project as we had to make the tree trunk by painting the children's arms and hands brown and pressing it onto the paper. I pre-puched hearts with a Martha Stewart craft punch; this is something older children could do themselves safely as well. I used several different prints of scrapbooking paper along with pink and red construction paper. The kids were then able to glue the hearts on as the leaves on their trees however they wanted!

We made handprint hearts as well which are very easy. We cordinated the color of the hand print with the color of the border paper. If you can have the children hold their hands just right, the space in between their thumbs makes another little heart!
We read several Valentine books; a few favorites were:

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Rose