Valentine's Day

I think the best way to celebrate Valentine's Day is to celebrate it with children.

They exude love daily, and most of the time without judgement, it is just there and it bubbles out of them.

Today we ate heart shaped pancakes, made Valentine's, sang songs, read stories, explored on the light table, made a second batch of crayons, danced, built forts, had a circus, played cars, built bird houses out of blocks, and rested...phew....it was an exciting and fun filled day.

Here are some pictures of our projects from the day.  Some of these are from the days before Valentine's as well.

 Apple and Spelt Pancakes in  heart shapes.  For some reason I can't get

this picture to rotate, perhaps it would make us too hungry to see them

right side up!

An invitation to play with heart shaped gems on the light table.

Crayon Making

I saw this project posted on Pinterest and had to try it with the kids!

This is one of the crayons that did not melt all the way, but I love how it came out.

We started this project off by gathering our broken crayons as well as using some cheap crayons I purchased at the store.

I have never met a child who does not love to peel the paper off of crayons and break them,

An adult for that matter as well,  for if you saw my assistant and myself sitting with the kids, you would wonder who was more into this process.

With that said, have the children choose the colors they would like, and then peel the paper and break the crayons.  They should fill a small Dixie sized cup.

Using these rubber muffin tins, fill each slot with crayons.  I labeled the trays so we could keep track of each child's rainbow crayon.

Bake the crayons at 230 degrees for 15 minutes

Here are some of the finished projects.  Next time I would take out the dark crayons such as black and really dark blue because they over powered the other colors.

Yarn Hearts

This is a nice simple project, but it requires a couple days to dry.  I found this one in Family Fun.

You will need a heart cookie cutter, wax paper (I taped it down on card board), yarn cut into 10-12 inch strips, liquid starch and a pan to pour it in.

Have the children dip the yarn in the liquid starch and then squeeze some of it off between their fingers.  Then simply press the yarn into the cookie cutter shape.  Press down a couple times after all the yarn is in the cookie cutter so that the starch spreads over all the pieces.  Let dry a couple days, and then add a string to hang.

Valentine's Hearts

We love using eyedroppers at school, in particular when we color with washable markers and the let it bleed the colors into each other, today was no exception.

The results are beautiful

A heart after it has been colored with washable markers

It really is a fun and beautiful process watching the colors bleed together

After the heart dried, the children glued their pictures onto their hearts and then taking the glue bottle,

they drew a design with glue and sprinkled glitter all over the glue.  Again, this is a school favorite, because there seems to be magic in glitter.

I would say it was a very lovely Valentine's Day