Pattern Block Heart for Valentine’s Day

When my daughter was younger she (and I) loved playing with pattern blocks or tanagram blocks, and they don’t have to be just for little kids when you get into more detailed pictures that you can make with the blocks.

This Valentine’s pattern block heart from You Clever Monkey is a great example. The heart can be made using mostly trapezoids, with a few rhombuses and triangles thrown in. There’s a version that just presents the challenge and another for younger kids that shows the pattern so they can just lay the shapes on top.

She has other shapes on challenge cards, too, if you have kids who are really into pattern blocks. They’d be great to print out for your block area.

[Photo: You Clever Monkey.]

After sharing some witch themed math activities, I found a bunch more fun printable worksheets with a Halloween theme for kids to try, so let’s take a look at some more low-prep Halloween learning fun.

Give kids practice measuring bats, spiders, ghosts and more with these printables from What I Have Learned Teaching. Kids can use a ruler, unit cubes or even little Halloween themed erasers to measure and track the size of the images.

Practice symmetry by drawing half a haunted house, ghost, skull or other simple images with this activity from Printables Hub.

I always love a good roll and draw activity, too, so check out this roll and draw a ghost activity (which has printable instructions) from Finding Myself Young.

Missy Printable Design has a cute set of Halloween worksheets for preschool, including tracing the letter H and a haunted house, spider counting, number tracing, sequencing, coloring pages and more.

The Halloween themed printables from The Artisan Life are meant to be playdough mats, and you can definitely use them for that to make the shape and trace the letters. But you could also use pipe cleaners or Wikki Stix, or line up buttons or anything else on them.

Older kids will enjoy this witch’s brew logic puzzle from Education.com. The witch has made different potions with different colors that do different things, and using the clues you can figure out which one is which. (Don’t worry; there’s an answer key included if you can’t figure it out on your own!)

Another fun puzzle is this decoder activity from Crafting Cheerfully. The holiday icons each represent a letter, and kids can use the decoder to answer the riddle. This isn’t a free resource (and the link in the post is broken but you can find it here) but it includes 20 riddles and an editable file so you can make up your own codes to decipher.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply