“Berry” Sweet Kid-Made Valentines

With my oldest daughter’s birthday at the end of January and my youngest daughter’s birthday at the beginning of March, I tend to stick to just a couple of fun Valentine’s activities that the kids will enjoy.

This week we’ve done a few painting activities to decorate the house and some Valentine’s sensory play. We also started making homemade valentines that we will share with friends and family. The “berry” theme isn’t new, but I thought the girls would especially like it since they both have a new-found love of Strawberry Shortcake.

I wanted the preschoolers to be able to do as much of the activity as possible without too much help from me. We started by practicing connecting a few dots and looping our line without lifting our markers. They both had fun making all sorts of “vines” on our first (practice) paper.  Then I gave them the paper for their cards (like the one below), and they made a vine for the cover of their cards.

Next we added thumbprint strawberries with red paint. I think it would have been fun to use strawberry-scented paint, but sadly this genius idea came to me after we were done…next time!

When the paint dried, we added black dots and the tops of the berries. We experimented with a few different sayings that will be used for different friends and family.

The “I’m BERRY glad we’re friends” cards will be shared with a few friends. These could easily be made for a group of kids like classmates, neighbors, or church groups. We will be attaching our cards to a small container of strawberry-scented playdough inspired by The Imagination Tree’s Valentine’s Playdough.

We are making the “We love you BERRY much” cards to share with extended family. Each of us will add a thumbprint strawberry. Then we will label them with our names.

The other cards below are the first ones the kids chose to make. They both chose to make cards for their Dads, but the sentence could easily be changed as needed.

These cards could have easily been made on small rectangles of paper, but we used folded cards so the kids could add their own drawings inside. I wanted them to have a space that was just their own to share something with the person receiving the card. They spent quite some time adding detailed pictures inside, and they were both very proud of their finished valentines.

And I am sure there are a ton more cute sentences we could come up with…That might even be a fun activity for older kids to do when making their own valentines.

Will you be making valentines cards with your kids this year?

This post has been shared at some of these fantastic link parties.