Valentine Play Dough Shape Mats - Fantastic Fun & Learning

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Learn about shapes and work essential fine motor muscles as kids create a “box” of chocolates with these free printable Valentine Play Dough Shape Mats.

If you are looking for a fun way to have your kids learn about shapes while also working in essential fine motor muscles, your kids will love making their box of chocolates with this free printable!

Valentine Play Dough Shape Mats - learn about shapes and practice fine motor skills with this free printable

FIND EVEN MORE VALENTINE’S DAY ACTIVITIES IN OUR PRINTABLE LESSON PLANS ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY AND HEARTS.

During our Valentine’s theme activities, we’ve been using our own homemade box of chocolates to create a few fun, hands-on activities for the classroom. Here we are using them with our free printable Valentine Chocolates shape mats to practice creating and recognizing 2D shapes. This activity is a great small group or center activity for preschool or kindergarten.

VALENTINE CHOCOLATES SHAPE MATS SET

This activity weaves in a bunch of fine motor practice as well as helping your kids learn to make 2D shapes out of play dough! To start this activity, print out our Valentine Play Dough Shape Mats and get any small manipulatives you’d like to use.

See the Valentine Play Dough Shape Mats in Action

Watch this short video to get a glimpse at how you might use the shape mats with your kids. Then read on for the full details.

Getting Started with this Valentine Shapes Activity

If you prefer to skip the play dough and keep it super simple, you can always use loose parts like buttons, candy hearts, or valentine mini erasers and have kids outline the shapes on the Valentine shape mats.

If you want to up the fun level and add in an additional layer of sensory play, you can use play dough! You’ll need to either make your own chocolate play dough using this homemade chocolate play dough recipe or buy some play dough to use. You can also use three different kinds of play dough if you’d like to have different kinds of “chocolate”.

Your kids will love using dough cutters to make different shaped “chocolates” to make their own box of Valentine’s Day chocolates! You can have them use rollers or specific shape cutters.

Using rolling cutters to make the shapes will be a bit more advanced for most preschoolers, so if you want to differentiate and make it a bit easier for them you can also provide cookie cutters in each specific shape.

Your kids can also embellish their shape chocolates with loose parts such as pony beads, small buttons, etc to customize their own box of chocolates.

The free printable shape mat set includes pages for the following 2D shapes:

triangle
square
rectangle
circle
oval

You can easily differentiate which set of shapes kids get if needed.

Extend the Learning

If you’d like to weave in a little more learning, have your kids write the number on the bottom of the mat to show how many of each shape they made. You can have them add a magnetic letter, number tile, or just use a construction paper square with a number written.

You can also laminate the pages or pop them into dry erase pockets to make them last longer.

While you can incorporate this activity into a math small group activity, I would suggest doing this after your kids have had time to explore freely and create different shapes on their mats.

Get Your Free Printable Shape Mats

Looking for even more Valentine’s Day fun?

PRINTABLE VALENTINE’S DAY ACTIVITIES & LESSON PLANS

Save time and get right to the playful learning with our printable lesson plan sets. Each set includes over 30 playful learning activities related to the theme, and we’ve provided different versions for home preschool families and classroom teachers so all activities are geared directly toward your needs.

VALENTINE’S DAY THEME

GET YOUR VALENTINE’S DAY THEME LESSON PLANS

Also available on Teachers Pay Teachers.

HEART THEME

Learn about healthy hearts, symmetry and more in this week-long lesson plan set full of hands-on math, reading, & science learning activities for a preschool heart theme that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day. Watch this short video to see just a few examples of the types of activities and printables included in this set: