I absolutely adore Valentines Day! It is such a wonderful time to express love to my little kids and my husband in a special way thats all part of a big celebration. In addition to us sharing love in our family, we like to use the Valentine’s Day season (The first 14 days of February in our home) to “spread love” in our community. It is so important for me to teach my children that no matter how young or small they are, they can make a huge difference for better. I also want to help them build empathy and a greater appreciation and understanding for those around them.
That is why I created the “Spread Love Challenge” last year. It’s 14 days with a small task assigned to each day that is meant to spread a little love and appreciation to those around us. We really enjoyed participating in it last year. One of the activities is to make valentines for hospitalized children. Because I have toddlers I wanted to find a craft that was easy enough for them to complete in a large quantity, yet still looked special. I couldn’t quite find what I wanted, so I created these heart flowers.
I prep the materials, my kids decorate the hearts, then I assemble them and finish them off. All-in-all it takes hardly any time per valentine and they come out looking adorable. We were so pleased with the results that I decided to share them here with all of you. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do and we hope they help you spread a little love to those special in your life.
Supplies:
- construction paper (Any colors will work. We used pink,red and green.)
- medium of choice to decorate hearts (We used glitter markers, but stickers, stamps and glitter would also be fun. Get creative!)
- thin sharpie marker
- glue stick
- large craft sticks
Process:
- Cut hearts out from your construction paper. (I used the fold in half method.)
- Use your craft sticks to find the size of heart that you would like.
- Once you have a heart the size you would like, use it as a template to cut out more hearts until you have the number of hearts that matches the number of valentines you want to make.
- Cut out leaves from your green construction paper. I just eye-balled an almond shape and used my craft stick as guide again for size. You will need two leaves per valentine.
- Decorate your hearts and then assemble your heart flower and glue it together. Leave space in-between your leaves for writing.
- Using your thin sharpie write “Happy Valentines Day” or another message of your choice on your exposed craft stick.
If you give this Beyond the Book activity a try I’d love to hear how it goes! Share it on Instagram using hashtag #beyondthebook (I’m on Instagram as @book.nerd.mommy) or even just comment here with your thoughts. It would make my day! Or to simply save for later pin the image below.
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