We rarely allow for a guest writer on our site, but we have had Kitty Holman provide a wonderful post before so we welcome her here again.
Helping Your Children Make Homemade Valentine’s Day Cards
Instead of buying pre-packaged Valentine’s Day cards from the grocery store this year as your child prepares for his or her class’s Valentine’s Day card exchange, why not encourage your child’s creativity by helping them craft their own Valentine’s Day cards for their friends? Here we’ll explore some easy steps you can take to help your children make their Valentine’s Day cards by hand.
Gather all the materials your child will need.
Construction paper hearts are super-easy to make and lots of fun for your children to dress up. All you really need to do is purchase some construction paper (red and pink are the most Valentine-y, but your child may want to make blue, green and yellow Valentine’s Day cards as well), scissors (maybe even some crazy scissors that create unique scalloped or otherwise stylized edges), some markers for the Valentine’s Day message and some glue or tape for any decorations.
You may even pick up some lacy ribbon or doilies from a fabric or craft store for a different take on edges. Stickers are an option for decoration as well as the magazines you have lying around the house for clipping out fun images to paste on the heart with a glue-stick. Finally, consider individually-wrapped candies–like Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, gum or suckers–that your child can tape on to the Valentine as an added bonus.
Print out a heart pattern online.
Unless you’re really great at drawing out a perfectly proportioned heart (I know I’m not) or have something heart-shaped around the house to trace, I suggest going online and doing a Google image search for heart patterns, blowing it up as big as you can and printing it out for your children to trace.
Make sure your child has a list of their classmates.
No one wants to be the kid left out who doesn’t get any Valentines from his or her classmates. To keep this from happening, be sure you have a list of all the kids in your child’s class. If your child’s teacher hasn’t already sent your child home with a list, ask the teacher to send you one.
Get to work!
Now that you have all the materials for your children’s homemade Valentine’s Day cards, set them to work! Supervise as they cut out the hearts and decorate the outside with lace. Let them come up with heartfelt messages for their friends and give them some ideas if they need them.
Helpful hints: Writing doesn’t always show up well on red construction paper, so you may want to cut out a smaller heart with white construction paper and let your child write his or her Valentine’s Day message on that instead, affixing it later to the bigger red heart with a glue-stick. Encourage your child to write out their message on another piece of paper first before finally writing it on the Valentine’s card to prevent mess-ups. Have fun!
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Kitty Holman, who writes on the topics of nursing colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email.
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