Valentine's Day Chocolates Play Dough Invitation

My youngest has been having so much fun creating with play dough lately that I wanted to build on her enthusiasm with a fun Valentine’s Day activity. We’ve made so many play dough invitations over the years, but it’s been a long time since we whipped up a batch of chocolate play dough. This seemed like the perfect opportunity! With this Valentine’s Day Chocolates Play Dough Invitation kids can pretend to work in their own chocolate factory as they create pretend chocolates.

FIND EVEN MORE VALENTINE’S DAY ACTIVITIES IN OUR PRINTABLE LESSON PLANS

ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY AND HEARTS.

Materials for Valentine’s Day Chocolate Play Dough

You can keep this simple by using just one option for “chocolate” if you’d like. We decided to use three kinds. For our white chocolate we used this white play dough recipe. For milk chocolate we used our go-to play dough recipe and added a bit of brown food coloring. To make our dark chocolate play dough we used the same recipe from our reindeer play dough invitation.

Once we had our play dough ready we set it out with:

Empty chocolate boxes and containers
Small containers of manipulatives-Our little heart containers are from Dollar Tree. I also left a few empty ones so kids can put individual chocolates in them.)
Loose parts-Usually we use craft materials for loose parts, but I spotted this combo set of Wilton Valentine Sprinkles at Walmart, and I thought they were the perfect size and variety for this activity. Since we usually don’t use food my daughter didn’t even realize they were edible until I told her! While they worked great for this activity, the colors do transfer a bit if they get moist, so once little ones are done creating it’s important to take the sprinkles off and put them back. If you’d rather not use sprinkles, you could also use things like small beads and gem stones. Go with what works best for you!

See it in Action

Time to Play

The beauty of play dough invitations is how much time kids will spend working with them. Honestly! This one kept my youngest engaged for over an hour, and I pulled her away to eat lunch. She would have kept going!

As kids are creating their own box of chocolates they’re also engaging those fine motor muscles…especially with small maniplatives like these ones that require a pincer grasp.

If you watch closely as kids create, you’ll also notice other skills being worked into the mix. There was a lot of patterning as she created designs on her chocolates. Kids will also match colors, sort by color, count how many more chocolates they did to finish filling the box, and more.

There’s so much learning to be done through play if we sit back and let it happen!

This was just the beginning though. Later we repurposed these materials for another fun learning activity.

You can get even more use out of this play dough invitation by incorporating math with our free printable Valentine’s Play Dough Counting Mats.

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.