Easy Valentine’s Day Crafts

There are so many ideas for Valentine’s Day crafts out there, but this year I wanted to keep it simple. Let’s look at some cute and fun Valentine’s Day crafts kids can do in the classroom or at home.

A simple paper weaving heart is a great project for practicing fine motor skills, and you can make it all with paper strips or add in yarn or different kinds of paper for different textures. Little Ladoo has a printable template for the heart shape with lines you can cut (an adult should do that part) to hold the weaving.

Cutting out and doodling on hearts makes a super cute craft, which you can turn into a garland or join hearts together to hang from the ceiling, or just make a bulletin board decoration. Or you can make a bouquet of hearts like in this project from Make and Takes. This one is shown as a greeting card but I also love the idea of kids making hearts to give to each other (so long as everyone makes one for everyone in the classroom).

Another cute card idea is this celery print heart card from The Merry Thought. Use the cut end of celery to make heart shapes to decorate cards or other Valentine’s Day projects.

Valentine’s Day, like any other time of year, is ripe for STEM experiments and projects, and The Best Ideas for Kids has a collection of classic STEM ideas with a Valentine’s twist. Of these only one (borax crystal hearts) really qualifies as a craft, but they’re all fun to make with kids in the classroom or at home.

If you have a small group of kids (and a little time for prep) you can make these cute no-sew heart pillows from Sugar Spice and Glitter. Depending on the age of the kids and the number of pairs of scissors you have, you can prep this one by cutting out the hearts and the ties or just just the hearts, or let the kids do it all themselves.

Need more ideas? Check out these posts on Valentine’s Day crafts for the classroom and printable Valentines kids can color.

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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