free printable

How to Make Slime and Valentines

2013

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:

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

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!

Filed Under: Valentine's Day Tagged With: free printable, homemade valentines, preschool, school age, science, slime, valentines for kids

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.

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)

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!

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

Filed Under: Valentine's Day Tagged With: fabric paint, free printable, heart window clings, homemade valentines, kids crafts, valentines day printable, valentines for kids

Colorlicious Color Game

2012

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This month’s challenge for The Little Book Adventure was to create a game based on a book. When I explained it to my 6 year old she immediately said, “Oh, let’s do a game for Pinkalicious!” They decided that they wanted to make a game where the players pretended to eat food and then turned the color of the food. So that’s what we did!

They collected food in different colors and we made a color die to roll to decide which food to eat. To make the die we duct taped two waffle box corners together to form a cube and then covered each side with a different color square of construction paper.

Then we designed game boards. They wanted people on it in each of the colors, but this was the best I could do in Word! If you want to use them too, just download the free COLORLICIOUS GAME BOARD PRINTABLE.

Then the big kids colored the faces and added googly eyes! This was also the point they decided to change the name from Coloricous to Colorlicious–I admit it’s catchier, but I didn’t want to waste the supplies so this one is still on their boards.

Then we were ready to play! We started by rereading the book. Then they took turns rolling the color die and eating the food. They used a goldfish to mark the corresponding color face on the game board.

They really put their acting skills to work while eating and loved pretending that they were turning different colors!

We kept playing until all of the faces were marked.

As you can see they had a blast playing! And each got to practice colors at their level. The two year old identified and matched the colors for us. The four year old identified each color word on a chart, and the six year old practiced spelling the words for us. Tons of fun for the whole family!