Play School: Valentine's Day

Whew!  We have been covered in hearts around here all week and it has been a lot of fun.  I've never been a big Valentine's Day kind of girl;  I think the holiday is sort of cheesy but I know I am really lucky to have a husband who makes me feel loved all year long.  (awwww.)

But Valentine's with kids!  Super fun.  The boys, surprisingly, really got into it.  Especially yesterday.  I started Play School on Monday and spread the activities out all week due to one of my little guys having a yucky stomach bug.  We did one or two things a day and the boys really enjoyed everything.  Yesterday morning I woke them up and told them it was Valentine's Day and they both said "Yay!"  Very cute.  They loved getting their cards and they loved the little "Cars" stamp and sticker set we got them (from the dollar store!)  Grammy and Grandpa hooked them each up with a heart filled with M&M's so they weren't completely deprived of candy either.

But on to our Play School activities....

Books:
Happy Valentine's Day, Mouse by Laura Numeroff
Happy Valentine's Day, Little Critter by Mercer Mayer
Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton
Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McGratney

This was our first "Little Critter" book; I loved them as a kid myself so I am looking to reading many more of them with my boys!

Activities:

Heart Hunt- I originally saw the idea here....but we did our heart hunt a little differently.  While the kiddos were napping I cut out 10 hearts from construction paper, labeled them one through ten, and then taped them around the play room.  When they woke up I explained we were going looking for hearts and they were off and running! We used this game to work on number recognition and counting.  The boys are starting to recognize and identify some numbers but they aren't counting yet of course.  They loved searching out the hearts!

H is for Heart- we decorated large letter H's with hearts to put in our alphabet books

Pink Heart Sugar Cookies- The boys love cooking with Mommy so they were happy to help me make some sugar cookie dough; they were so excited when I dyed it pink!

Heart Stamping with toilet paper rolls- For this little art project I just saved two empty toilet paper rolls and creased one end of each to look like a heart.  I gave each boy a "stamp", a paper plate with pink and red paint, and a large piece of paper and let them go to town!

As I sit here and type this it just occurred to me that this is really the first time I have done a paint project with the boys without laying down a sheet or newspaper or something.  They are really doing a great job now of keeping (most) of their paint to just the paper. :)

Valentine's Day Cards- I set out some materials on Wednesday for the boys to make cards for their Grammy and Grandpa (that live with us) and Daddy.  I wish I had though to do this sooner so we could have sent cards to our other Grandparents but it didn't occur to me in time.

Valentine's Sensory Box- So I finally sprung for some rice to do sensory boxes with.  My boys have always loved any kind of sensory box and I knew rice would be a great base but just never bought any.  So this past weekend I went out and bought two 25lb bags of rice....whaat???  Yeah.  A little overkill.  Turns out I didn't even really need one 25lb bag to fill up our large tub for the boys to share.  People out there looking to create a large sensory tub with rice?  15lbs should be plenty.

Anyway....  I added some foam heart stickers and some other heart stuff from the dollar store, some plastic measuring scoops and bowls.  The boys loved their box and played for almost an hour!

See what I mean?  Lot's of hearts and lots of fun.  Happy (belated) Valentine's Day from me and my little lovies to you and yours.



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