Mom's Tot School: Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day! Keep scrolling to see what we did this week to celebrate, or first take a look at what we've done in previous years:

Books

We borrowed some Valentine's Day books from the library. The Valentine Bears, by Eve Bunting and Jan Brett, was our favorite. Such a cute story!

Valentine's Day Bingo

I made this bingo game for Honey Pot back in 2012, and thought I'd pull it out for Little M&M. He really loved Toy Story bingo during our Disney Vacation Countdown, so I figured he'd enjoy it.

The game board was a little bit smaller than the Toy Story one we played, so the games flew by! He and I played this several times in a row.

Here he is celebrating his victory.

Valentine's Day Playdough

We actually pulled out the playdough three times during the week. The first time was just me and Little M&M while his big sister was at preschool. He loved rolling out the dough and making heart cutouts!

Silicone cupcake liners are a favorite playdough accessory around here too...

As we continued along, the play strayed from Valentine's Day themed, and he made robots...

and worms, and road roller monsters...

And then it was back to heart cutouts. Funny boy.

On another day this week, Honey Pot joined us. Though I guess this is the only picture I snapped because we were so busy creating!

And towards the end of our week, Honey Pot had received a playdough Valentine from a boy in her preschool, so we returned to this activity for a third time! She started by cutting hearts out:

Then she stacked them together, added eyes and a button nose, craft stick arms and legs, drew on a mouth and made a "Heart Alive."

She loves doing this. The other day she was playing with wooden blocks and formed a letter M out of them. She added arms and legs out of more blocks and called it an "M Alive." Love this new game!

Valentine's Day Shape Search

This is another activity I made for Honey Pot back in 2012. It seems a little below Little M&M's current level, but I think that made it a nice confidence booster for him! First I asked him to find the hearts and count them. And then, together, we counted up the circles.

Loads of Love, Math Activity

I pulled out this dump truck printable from The Measured Mom, which we had used during our construction unit last year. I love how versatile it is. Instead of counting blocks as we had last time, we pulled out our trusty heart cutouts, and loaded them up instead!

His one-to-one correspondence has improved so much since we did this activity last.

Gluing Hearts

I set Little M&M up with our heart cutouts, crayons and glue, and let him create to his heart's content.

Heart Do-a-Dot

Another simple activity that we squeeze into almost every theme: dot marker art! This particular printable comes from Gift of Curiosity.

Heart Patterns

I created some AB AB and ABB ABB patterns for Little M&M to work on. This has been difficult for him in the past, but he seems to be grasping this concept now!

He enjoyed it so much, he wanted to do more. So we set up three more patterns.

Letters in my Name - Love Bugs

This idea comes from Reading Confetti. Little M&M has been working on recognizing the letters of his name, so I wanted to do this cute activity with him. Please excuse where I've erased the real names...

Honey Pot also made one:

Cute!

Sorting and Graphing Conversation Hearts

We did this activity last year as well. The printable comes from Teaching Tiny Tots. I provided each of them with a set number of conversation hearts, where two columns would be equal and one would reach up to ten.

This was Little M&M's first time graphing. He did really well!

When both kids were done, we made observations about their graphs. I asked which column had the most hearts, and which had the least? Which two columns are equal? How many green hearts do you have? Etc.

And with Honey Pot, who recognizes numbers, we worked on how to read our graphs without counting.

Conversation Heart Stacking

I found a fun site called Makoodle with conversation heart Minute To Win It games. We tried a couple, starting with stacking!

Honey Pot really got into this activity. First she stacked them as you'd expect, as high as she could.

Then she decided it needed to be "longer at the bottom" so it could be sturdier.

Then it became less about stacking high, and more about just constructing an interesting building as she would with blocks:

Heart Relay Game

Another Minute To Win It game we borrowed from Makoodle was the heart relay! I gave each of the kids two Styrofoam cups and a spoon. They had to see who could be the first to transfer all the hearts from one cup to the other, which was placed at the other side of the room. Honey Pot was on a roll!

Little M&M was slow and steady. At times he became frustrated, so I jumped onto his team to help him.

It was a fun game, and Honey Pot won by mere seconds!

Glue + Sand Art

As I was searching my shelf for a sensory activity we could do, I came across some leftover craft sand. We had used this twice before. First it was pixie dust for Honey Pot's Peter Pan birthday party, when we bottled it up with spoons and funnels. Then for our ocean theme last summer, we used it with contact paper and stencils. I wanted to use it in a different way again, so we sprinkled it onto glue this time! First I drew a heart with glue, and the kids sprinkled the sand over it. When it was completely covered, we shook the excess sand off and it revealed a beautiful picture. They LOVED this craft!

As we did more, Honey Pot wanted to draw her own hearts, and squeeze the glue onto them!

I continued to draw Little M&M's hearts and help him with his glue.

But Honey Pot kept doing her own designs.

They worked hard at this for along time!

Eventually I wanted to use up some of the sand that had been tapped off, as we wouldn't be able to save it after that day. So we drew more designs with glue, and then pressed the whole paper onto the tray.

I let each of them create their own art, not necessarily related to Valentine's Day.

This is Honey Pot making a "Soap Monster."

Awesome!

And here is our finished work. Such a fun project! We cut a couple of these out later in the week, and included them in our letters to their pen pals in Canada.

And the sand stayed contained for the most part, so clean-up wasn't so bad either.

School Valentine's

We created glow stick Valentine's for Honey Pot's preschool class. The idea and printable came from Hansen Family Chaos. It was super easy to put together; however, I worried that the glow sticks would crack and turn on before the kids even got them home, just from being squished into their Valentine bags. Ah well. We have no way of knowing. But they were a nice idea!

Scissor Practice

Honey Pot sometimes still struggles with using scissors, so we worked on it a little bit this week.

Sight Words + Conversation Hearts

Honey Pot is getting really good at sounding out words. As the next step in learning to read, I thought I would introduce her to just a couple sight words. The idea to cover them in conversation hearts comes from Life Over C's. There are free printables provided there, but they are beyond Honey Pot's level, so I created my own for her.

Reading + Color Practice

The previous activity was a segue into this one. Together, we read each sentence, which contained both new sight words, as well as a color word to sound out. This was a challenging activity, but Honey Pot surprised me and did really well.