Celebrating Valentine’s Day can be a great creative venture! Here are 3 ways to keep busy without focusing on candy/treats.

Heart Decorations

Years ago, we purchased a block of scrapbooking paper and it ended up being one of the most used items in our home for crafts! The varying patterns and colors are useful for many holidays, and we reuse them every year. We recommend cutting heart shapes of all sizes with kiddo and using painter’s tape to adhere to the walls. For us, the limit does not exist- we do this almost every day until Valentine’s Day and enjoy the bountiful decorations.

We also use the paper to create big hearts on Valentine’s Day and tape them to kiddo’s chairs as a special breakfast surprise. We save these hearts and put them on kiddo’s bedroom doors as decorations the next year! They loved reading back old valentines and thinking about what this year’s decoration may include. These are not fancy- think a short ‘We love you!” message and a hand drawing of kiddo’s favorite thing on the other side (this year, it will be a robot, wish us luck).

Heart Painting

Painting, while messy, is such a great open-ended play tool. We use a roll of paper as both a painting surface and a ‘dropcloth’ under smaller painting projects. For Valentine’s Day, we will paint Valentines to send to family/friends, paint hearts in general, and paint wooden hearts to use as decorations for future years. We love being able to look back at Kiddo’s work and using it as decor for holidays! Once Kiddo can write, don’t forget to have them sign their work!

Kindness Jars

To encourage empathy-building, we like to create a ‘kindness jar’ this time of year and write simple acts of kindness. These can include ‘make your bed,’ ‘take a flower to neighbor,’ ‘help grandma clean up,’ ‘give a high five’ etc. We write them down and let kiddo draw one out of a jar to complete that day (or the next day, if needed, it’s flexible). They love thinking of ways to complete the task and enjoy doing them!

Incorporating them into play can sound like: you made your bed! How can you ask your Dolly to make her bed kindly? Can you play with kind words?

These are a few ways we like to focus on skill building and creativity for Valentine’s Day! What are ways you do this for your kiddo?