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How to Make Slime and Valentines

2013
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My son really wanted to make his own valentines this year and after a couple different ideas settled on passing out slime!  Making slime is really fun, super easy, and (surprisingly) not messy.
How to Make Slime with glue and Borax

How to Make Slime:

  1. Pour 8oz of Elmer’s glue into a glass bowl.
  2. Add in 8oz of warm water. (You can just fill up the empty glue bottle to save on dishes!)
  3. Add whatever color food coloring you choose.
  4. Stir the mixture.
  5. Put 1 teaspoon of Borax (a laundry product) into a small cup.
  6. Fill the cup up most of the way with water.  I just eyeball it.  I’m guessing 2/3 of a cup of water.
  7. Slowly add the Borax water to the glue bowl.  Keep stirring.
  8. Knead the slime until it’s absorbed the water.

As you begin to add the Borax solution the glue starts to become rubbery and super cool.  The two products actually react together and become polymers so making slime also doubles as a science demonstration!

Slime Valentines for Kids

Once we were done making (and playing with) the slime we divided it up into snack sized bags.  One batch of the recipe above made enough for 12 bags.  I typed up Happy Valen-slime’s Day! bag toppers and stapled them to the top of the bags.  You can print out the free printable Valenslime bag toppers by clicking on the link below.

Valenslime Free Printable Valentines

Slime is such a great sensory experience for kids–definitely something worth trying!  Especially since there are so many learning activities involved.  While preschoolers may not remember the term polymer they are exploring their world and building the vital background knowledge that will help them succeed in school.  Plus, it really is just plain cool to play with!

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Homemade Valentines for Kids: Car Painting

2013
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My kids love making homemade valentines and love painting with cars so it’s easy to see why these “You’re a wheel-y great friend!” valentines are such a hit!  We first made them when my son was two for all of his friends and since then we’ve made them as valentines, thank you cards, birthday cards…pretty much anything you can think of!

Car Painted You're a Wheel-y Great Friend Homemade Valentines for KidsMy three year old is very excited to get to make valentines to pass out to her friends this year and these are perfect!  So today I set up an invitation to play and paint for her and her brother.

Car Painting for Kids: Homemade Valentines

I crumpled up some of our brown craft paper to look like “hills and valleys” and laid it out on our chalkboard table.  I then set some of the red cards on top of it.

Valentine's Day Car PaintingI put a pile of “mud” on a small plate and got out a couple of cars to paint with.

Car Painted Homemade Valentines for Kids

Then they got to work! They drove and painted and had a lot of fun driving through the paint and all over the paper.

Homemade Valentines for Kids Car PaintingOnce the paint dried we taped a toy car onto the card and wrote, “You’re a wheel-y great friend!”

Super easy and fun!  What types of cards and valentines do your kids like to make?

If you have a car lover Toddler Approved also shared a cute car themed valentine this week–check it out!

Here’s some more of the valentines my kids have done:

I’m Stuck on You! Heart Window Clings Free Printable Valentine

Homemade Super Hero and Hershey Kiss Ring Kids Valentines

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After School Link Up at Parent Teach Play

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Alphabet Activities for Preschool: Heart Puzzles

2013
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Today I am teaming up with +Jamie Reimer from hands on: as we grow and +Jackie Higgins from Ready Set Read for a Valentine’s Day for Kids Google Plus Hangout!  We’ll be sharing Valentine’s Day themed letter activities for preschoolers–it will be so much fun!

Alphabet Activities for PreschoolIt will air LIVE both here and on my G+ profile page at 3pm EST today.  But no worries if you miss it–you can check back to either place anytime you want to watch the video!

As you can see in the video the heart puzzles are super easy to make!  Just cut out a bunch of heart shapes from red cardstock and cut in half.  Then write upper and lowercase letters or word chunks on each half for the kids to match up.

letter activities for preschool: heart puzzles

More ways to play with Broken Heart Letter Puzzles:

  • Match the uppercase and lowercase letter together
  • Identify the sound each letter makes
  • Find an object in the room that starts with the letter in the puzzle
  • Tell the preschooler a word, have him/her find the letter for the first or last sound in the word
  • Make new words with word chunks and consonants or blends.
  • Create a heart word sort with one word chunk.  Tell the kids to change the first letter and read the new word.  Repeat.
  • Write, stamp, type, or sticker the new words using various materials such as sand, paper, contact paper, etc.

This Valentine’s Day for Kids activity is part of a week of LIVE Hangouts on Air on G+!  Be sure to check the full schedule for all of the #vdayfun!

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Valentines for Kids: I’m Stuck on You Printable

2013
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Do you make your own valentines?  Download cute printable ones? Buy them at the store?

My kids like to make their own valentine cards and like to make holiday decorations.  So today we combined the two with some window cling valentines for kids!

I'm Stuck on You! Valentines for Kids: Free Printable Cards

The first thing we did was make the window cling hearts.  Yep, those colorful glittery hearts are actually homemade window clings.  You can read all of the directions in my Make Your Own Heart Window Clings post, but basically you draw heart designs on tin foil with 3D puffy paint and wait for them to dry.  And as you can see my kids also enjoy adding glitter.

White Stuck on You Valentine for Kids--Free Printable Craft

 Then I made these cute free printable valentine cards to go with our hearts!

How to print the cards at home:

  • Click on the image to go to the attachment page
  • Right click on it and save it to your computer
  • Print on glossy photo paper (the hearts won’t stick to cardstock)

Red Stuck on You Valentine for Kids: Free Printable Card

After the hearts are dry just stick them on the card in middle of the heart.  You don’t need to use anything to attach the heart, it will “cling” to the card all by itself!

Pink Stuck on You Valentine for Kids: Free Printable Cards

After the hearts are on the only thing left to do is sign your valentine with a marker and give it to someone special!

 

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Kindness Challenge: Love the Environment

2013
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Today is the first day of Toddler Approved’s 100 Acts of Kindness Project!  We are doing 52 Weeks of Kindness this year and are super excited to spend the next 4 weeks participating in the Kindness Project.  It’s a fantastic family activity and I was thrilled when Kristina asked me if I wanted to give the first challenge!

100 Acts of Kindness Week 1 Challenge from Coffee Cups and Crayons

Week 1 Challenge: Show some love to your environment!

This week we are challenging you to perform an act of kindness that helps the world around you.  It can be as simple as picking up litter, planting a tree, or feeding the birds!

To start things off we made simple DIY bird feeders that are shaped like a heart–a great way to show your feathered friends just how much you care!

Heart Shaped DIY Bird FeederWant to make them too?

Here’s what you need:

3/8 cup flour

1/4 cup water

1.5 T corn syrup

2 cups of birdseed

cookie cutters

plastic straw

yarn

How to Make Bird Seed Ornament Bird Feeders

Stir the first three ingredients together and then mix the birdseed in by hand.

Pack the mixture into heart shaped cookie cutters on a wax paper lined surface.

Stick small piece of plastic straw into the middle to tie a string through.

Let dry overnight.

Tie with yarn and hang from a tree or bush.

Cardboard Bird Feeders

While we were waiting for the bird treats to harden we came up with another idea…

Cardboard Bird Feeders! 

These were so easy to make we decided to share these with you too!

All we did was trace and cut out heart shapes on leftover cardboard pieces and punched a hole in the top.  Then we “painted” some with corn syrup and some with peanut butter.  We sprinkled bird seed on and hung them from a tree with yarn.  Super easy and cute!

Now it’s time to show a little love to your environment!  We can’t wait to hear about what you do this week!

Make sure to visit Toddler Approved for all of the scoop on the 100 Acts of Kindness Project and the rest of the weekly challenges!  And remember, no act is too small!

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Making Homemade Valentines!

2012
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Do you make or buy valentines?  We are homemade valentine makers around here!  This year the kids went all out and worked very hard to create special gifts for their friends.

My 3 1/2 year old loves superheroes, especially Batman, and picked out these cool superhero lollipops from Little Bit Funky!  The idea is ingenious and was a huge hit.  If you have a little one who likes superheroes you have got to see how easy she has made it for everyone to make these.  They’d even be fun at a superhero themed birthday party.

We made the Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman ones, but there were also instructions and printables to make the Green Lantern, and the Flash.  For Batman we used Zakka Life’s superhero lollipop graphics to add a yellow mask.  I thought the mask helped make the brown lollipop coordinate a little better with the black accessories, but it’s definitely cute either way!

 

My kindergartener made her own ring out of pipe cleaners and Hershey kisses using the instructions on the Family Fun website.  They were extremely cute and she only needed a little help to twist the pipe cleaners around the kiss.

No matter what kind of valentines you hand out, Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to show those you care about just how much you love them!

Check out my Valentine’s Day board on Pinterest for more ways to share the love!  What fun things are you doing today to celebrate?

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Letter Matching with Hearts

2012
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Last year my awesome sister sent the kids this fun and educational letter game!  She called it Lower Case Love and made it by printing each lower case letter on pink and red paper.  Then, being the superstar that she is, she cut them into heart shapes and even laminated them.  (Like I said, superstar.)

And, of course, being the former kindergarten teacher she is, she also sent game suggestions.

Here’s what we play:

  1. Hunting for Hearts.  Each kid grabs one of our many buckets and tries to find as many hearts as he or she can.  We basically use this as the start of our activity because they love looking for them!
  2. Lower Case Letter Match.  Preschoolers don’t even know they are practicing letter identification when they find and match the corresponding red and pink letters together.  This is fun to do after a hunt.  Sometimes I even only hide certain letters I think one of them may need extra practice with.
  3. Letter Memory.  Choose a bunch of letter pairs to play with and place them face down on a table.  The kids take turns turning over letters to find matches.  You know the drill.
  4. Making Words.  Last year only my PreK-er was able to put the letters together to form words, but this year the 3 1/2 year old was able to play too.  So fun!  For him, my kindergartener made CVC words and had him sound them out, helping him when he got stuck.  He did very well and it was so exciting to see them working together like that.  My kindergartener then tried to see how many sight words she could make off her word wall.

This game can be easily adapted to practice numbers, words, and even be made with different holiday shapes.  What do you do to add a little learning into your holiday fun?

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Red Hot Play Dough Recipe

2012
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This week we were inspired by all of the Valentine’s Day candy in Target to come up with a new play dough recipe and science experiment – Red Hot Play Dough!

Here’s what we used:

  • 2 cups of flour
  • 1 cup of salt
  • 1 cup of cornstarch
  • 1/4 cup of cream of tartar
  • 2 cups of hot water
  • 2 teaspoons of oil
  • 1 box of Red Hots candy

(We used our crock pot play dough recipe, even though the consistency isn’t as good, because we needed the water for the Red Hots.)

Before we made the play dough we did a little experiment to see what would happen to the Red Hots if we put them in hot water.  We decided to put 20 candies into the water and the big kids made a prediction about what they thought would happen to the candy.

Their prediction: The water would turn red and the candy would turn white.

After a couple of minutes we checked the candy and discovered that the water was definitely turning red, but the candies weren’t turning white at all.  They decided to modify their prediction and concluded that the candies would completely disappear into the water.

And they were right!  The candies completely dissolved and turned the water bright red and cinnamon-y.

We then put our crock pot on low and added all the ingredients.

Then a little over an hour later we had this yummy smelling play dough that was…pink!  The kids were a little disappointed, we had been calling it Red Hot Play Dough after all, and decided that we would dissolve the entire box of Red Hots in the water next time to see what would happen.

If you had time you could put other types of candies or food into hot water to see what happens.  Depending on their age and ability levels the kids can record their predictions and even graph their results.  This would be a great activity to do while waiting for the play dough to cook in the crock pot.  There is always a lot of fun and learning to be had during a cooking activity!

Try Red Hot Play Dough this Valentine’s Day (with the whole box) and let us know what you think!

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Make Your Own Heart Window Clings

2012
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Window clings have been holiday decoration staples for as long as I can remember.  And while not all of the ones you can find in the stores these days may catch your eye, homemade ones sure will!  Last week the kids and I grabbed some puffy fabric paint and some glitter and DIY’d some in no time at all.

To make the heart window clings you need fabric paint, wax paper or tin foil and any add-in you want such as glitter or sequins.

 Squeeze the paint out into your desired shape.  Make sure that you really glob it on.  It needs to be nice and thick because it shrinks as it dries and if it is too thin cracks and holes will form.  My 3 1/2 and almost 6 year old were able to do this all by themselves with no trouble, but I had to assist my 2 year old (and by assist I mean watch her like a hawk so no paint ended up in her hair or on me!)

As you work don’t forget to talk to the kids about the colors you are using, which ones can be mixed to form new colors, and any color patterns that may be forming.  These little everyday discussions are much more effective way than sitting down with flash cards for a color wheel lesson!

 Once the paint is on nice and thick it’s time to embellish!  Sprinkle on your glitter, sequins, or other lightweight art supply.

Leave the paint out overnight to dry and then stick your hearts anywhere you need a little Valentine’s Day cheer…the windows, the bathroom mirror, the microwave, the refrigerator - the possibilities are endless!

In fact how fun would it be to make your own name window clings or a phone number window cling?  Sounds like a fun and multi-sensory way for kids to learn their personal information.  I like it.  We’ll try it out and let you know how it worked!

Leave me a comment letting me know what you think.  I’d love to hear what you come up with!

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