Valentine Garland Kid’s Craft

Since I was gone all weekend, I have a lovely friend who is sharing a very cute (and educational) craft. Please welcome Becky Marie from For This Season.

Since taking down our Christmas decorations, I’ve had my boys help decorate for each holiday. I love how a simple craft, like Valentine decorations, can easily become a math lesson for my 5 and 2 year old boys.

We used the craft supplies on hand to make a heart garland to hang over our fire place. To make a similar craft you will need paper, shape punches, a hole punch, paper clips, ribbon, and tape.

Bebop, my 5 year old, cut the paper into strips about an inch and a half wide. We used a combination of construction paper, card stock and scrapbook paper in all shades of red and pink. Magoo, my 2 year old, and I reviewed colors and talked about the texture of the paper.

Both boys used the shape punches to make circles and hearts. I thought they would be too hard for the boys, but both were able to punch shapes easily. Bebop did a very good job of lining up the paper and punching a complete shape. Magoo was not so careful and punched out a lot of half circles.

Magoo lost interest in the shape punches after about 5 minutes, so I had him start sorting the shapes. We reviewed shapes, circle and heart, and I introduced crescent as we made a pile of the incomplete circles. We also sorted the hearts by color and texture. .

I planned to alternate hearts and circles in the final garland, but we ended up with plenty of hearts and only a few circles. Bebop used the hole punch on the hearts while Magoo and I started making paper clip chains. Magoo handed me paper clips and I linked them together. We practiced counting as we made chains of 5 and 7 paper clips. I also had Magoo put the hearts into piles of 3 and 5 to be added to the chains. He could count to 3, but not 5. Bebop was happy to help and pretended to be the teacher, coaching his little brother to count to 5.

At this point we packed up the decorations and took them upstairs to hang over the fireplace. I taped the ribbon to the fireplace and we began hanging the paper clip chains. Bebop was in charge of the final pattern. He picked out the chains, alternating between 5 and 7. The final garland is hanging up too high for either boy to reach. Since they were not able to help they quickly lost interest and started chasing each other around the living room.

In total this engaged them for about 20 minutes. It took me another 20 minutes to hang all the paper clip chains. To complete the display, I left up the lights and tissue paper from our winter decorations. We also made a set of pink yarn sleeves for the candles.

 

Becky Marie is a stay at home mom to three little boys. Their days are filled with cars, dinosaurs and robots. Becky blogs about homeschooling, cooking and living with dairy allergies at For This Season.