Valentine inspired easel painting

For a twist on traditional easel painting (which secretely drives me crazy with the big brushes and the mess it makes!)  I put out small paint squirt bottles (in the cake making supply isle at Michaels).  Filled with red, white, and purple the children put small amounts in the supplied paint pallet and tint it with the white creating lavender and pink!  They can use the dark colors too as there's enough compartments in the pallet for lavender, pink, white, dark red, and dark purple.

With smaller brushes supplied they are able to paint more detailed pictures.  Not pictured is a paint holder with water in it to rinse their brushes before changing color and a damp sponge to dab their brush clean and dry.

1-10 heart counting

My director made this and its' been very fun this month!  The cards have a clip art heart on each one and they are lined up as you would would the counters in cards and counters (representing odd and even numbers) but with control of error!  The hearts came from Target a couple years ago.  Although you could use valentine color flat marbles or heart erasers which seem easy to find during February!

Valentine water transfering

I love these containers!  They are sold at Michaels (or use to be anyway).  Just an empty heart bottle with a cork top.   I use a eye dropper of sorts (the plastic kind you can get from Montessori-n-such) .

Valentine Pom-Pom Tweezing

This is yet another activity using the suction cup pads I previously posted about here here.  Just some simple pom pom balls and some tweezers.  These tweezers light up red when squeezed!  I believe they are for scrapbooking (possibly from Creative Memories).  I jut can't get enough of using these pads!

Friendship Braclets

With Valentines day coming, we've been talking a lot about the value of love and friendship!  It brought back memories of making 'friendship bracelets' from when I was in elementary school!  This is a different version of that geared for the young preschooler!  We're encouraging them to make these friendship bracelets for their friends.  In the small bowl are letter beads to spell their friends name!  If it's friend from our classroom they can go get their name card to see how to spell it!

Heart Sewing

For a variation of a sewing activity we are using plastic sewing cards (found in the sewing/embroidery section of Michaels or Joanne's)  I traced a heart (some pink, some purple) and pre-cut the yarn (in coordinating color) and attached it to the sewing card.  The needle is stored in the little jar in the pink basket.  This work has been fun for the last week as most kids can do it independently and you can see the pattern on both sides of the card!

  In the end I cut it out (if they'd like) for the perfect Valentine to take home :)

Heart Magnets

This was an idea my director came up with just yesterday and I put it together last night! I found these little hear magnets (probably from a drug store like Wallgreenss or Rite Aid) in the school's Valentine box.  We took a piece of thin steel (sold in hardware stores) glued on a piece of lavender paper on it and added some heart stickers (color coded) to make the shape of a heart.  We then laminated it so it can be used for years to come!  It's very fun and as well as refining those small motor skills it  helps with one-to-one correspondence too!

Felt Heart Matching

This is an extension of color box 2.  I just cut out hearts of all 11 colors to match!  It's beautiful all laid out and brightens up the classroom in February.  The heart basket was just a lucky thrift store find :)