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Are we feeling the LOVE yet? As we begin a new calendar year, we start by celebrating Valentine’s Day. Today I’m sharing some ideas for some fun Valentine’s crafts for kids. The best part is that most of these activities can be done using things you may already have around the house!
Valentine’s Crafts for Kids
1. Heart Letter Matching
This one is super easy to make and doesn’t require very many materials at all! Your kids will love it and come back to it again and again! Grab several pieces of colored construction paper (I chose to stick with red, white, and pink for the Valentine’s Day theme) and cut out 26 hearts. On one half of each heart, write the upper case letters. On the other side, write the lower case equivalent. Then cut each heart in half down the center. Mix up the pieces and have your child match each heart to have an upper and lower case letter pair. This is a great hands-on learning activity for young kids that they’re sure to love!
2. Cotton Ball Painting
This activity is all about the process over the end result! Using a piece of recycled cardboard, glue several cotton balls into the shape of a heart and set it aside to dry. Once the cotton balls have dried, fill a cupcake tin with water and drop several drops of food coloring into each section. Have your child use a medicine dropper or eye dropper to transfer the colored water onto the cotton balls. If you don’t have these around the house, you can purchase a set on Amazon for cheap! Using medicine droppers is a great fine motor activity for your child to work on coordination, finger strength, and grading force. It’s a great way to isolate and strengthen the muscles in your child’s fingers that are used for writing, coloring, and other fine motor tasks.
3. Painted Rocks
Spread some love around your neighborhood! Go for a walk with the kids and collect various rocks (what kid doesn’t love to go pick out rocks, right?). Then grab some paints and decorate the rocks however you’d like. You can help them write out messages of love using a permanent marker. Or just leave them looking colorful! Then go around the neighborhood and leave the stones out by mailboxes or near your neighbors’ doorsteps. This is a great way to teach kids how to spread positivity and do kind things for others. This activity is fun all year round, but especially for Valentine’s Day!
4. How We Show Our Love
Grab a marker and some construction paper, and have your kids help you make a list of all the different ways we can show our love. With younger kids, they may need some prompting. But once you give them a few ideas, they should be able to come up with some on their own. It’s a great conversation to have as a family around the dinner table. And it helps kids identify different feelings and how their actions impact others. If you have slightly older children, they could even be the ones to do the writing.
5. Yarn Heart
Be still my heart! You can set this activity up in a matter of a couple of minutes, and it will preoccupy your little one for a good chunk of time! Cut out a heart from some recycled cardboard. Punch some holes along the edge, leaving about a 1-inch border. Give your child a bundle of red yarn (you can wrap some tape around the end of the yarn to make it easier for them to lace) and have them practice lacing all around the edge of the heart. You can impose as much structure as you want for this activity (i.e., encouraging your child to lace just around the edge). But I decided to sit back and let our little guy go wherever he wanted with the yarn. Lacing is an excellent fine motor activity for kids, and the end result for this project is absolutely adorable!
6. Heart Resist Painting
This activity makes for a great gift for grandparents or other family members! Cut out a large heart and place it in the center of a piece of cardstock or a canvas. (I got these small canvases at the dollar store, so they’re incredibly affordable!) Gather some pink, red, and white paint and clip a cotton ball to the end of a clothespin (they will use it for dipping into the paint). Have your child dip the cotton ball into the paint and dot it all around the canvas, being careful not to disrupt the heart shape. To avoid one big smear of pink, it’s best to have your child work from lightest to darkest colors. Some color mixing is good and makes the end result look really pretty, but you definitely want some definition of pink vs. red.
7. I LOVE YOU Cards
These cards could not be any cuter and are incredibly easy to make! Trace your child’s hand on a piece of pink construction paper and cut it out. Glue down the middle and ring fingers so that the hand forms the sign for “I love you” in American Sign Language. I glued down just the fingertips so that the hand is sort of 3D. Once the fingers are dry, glue the whole hand cut out onto a folded piece of red construction paper and write “I love you” on the front. Have your child help you come up with a sweet message to a loved one, and there you have it! The sweetest little Valentine’s card that costs hardly anything!
Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your little love bugs! I hope you have fun doing these Valentine’s crafts for kids!
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