Valentine’s Activity for Kids: Hunt for Love

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Show your preschooler you care with a fun scavenger hunt Valentine’s activity!

I decided that we needed some kind of Valentine’s Day activity to do, instead of just crafty and artsy ideas.

We did a heart hunt last year, with great success.

But this year, I wanted to make Henry think about love a little.

So I came up with the Hunt For Love Valentine’s activity.

To start, we needed to make plain white paper bags pretty so its ready for some love, right?

George was around and awake, so we wanted to include him and have him decorate a bag too.

I quickly came up with something that’s colorful, edible and can be painted with.

Yogurt.

I split it up into four dishes (two for each of the boys) and added purple and pink food coloring to each of them.

Ta-da. Done. Edible fingerpaint. Super fast. Super easy.

(Or you can make this awesome Homemade Edible Finger Paint that has a gel consistency.)

The boys loved this paint! George might have loved it too much and ate quite a bit…

But it was a lot of fun.

After decorating our bags with paint. Henry and I embellished ours with glitter.

I cut out a heart stencil from a scrap piece of paper.

Henry shook the glitter on over it, and the glitter stuck nicely to the wet yogurt paint!

So we had made our plain white paper bags… pretty!

After a couple days of letting the paint dry, we got around to our Hunt For Love.

(FYI: the bags ripped a little when I opened them up. I should have opened them right away when they were done painting and stuffed them with newspapers.)

Within seconds of my handing the boys their paper Valentine’s bags… George ripped his to shreds. This kept George busy though!

Meanwhile, Henry and I worked on filling our bags with things we love. I tried to focus on Who we love, instead of material objects.

This was a little abstract for Henry since we couldn’t physically put a person that we loved into these small little paper bags.

I wasn’t too worried about it, and let Henry fill his up as he pleased.

Instead of telling him how to do this the way I had intended… As I filled mine up, I made suggestions by saying what I was putting in my bag and who it reminded me of.

Such as, “I love Dad, so I’m going to put this cookie in my bag. The cookie reminds me of Dad because he works at the bakery.”

or…

“This letter G reminds me of George because George starts with G.”

After a couple of these examples, Henry caught on a little bit. He grabbed the letter M and put it in for Mom!

Along with… His red combine, the grain truck and other favorite toys of his…

It was a fun little Valentine’s activity to talk to Henry about people we love. It was also neat to see him think in an abstract way, and glad he caught onto it, at least a little.

Other Paper Bag Activities we’ve done:

• Tissue Paper Bag Toddler Activity
• Stuffed Heart
  (This last one isn’t technically made from a paper bag, but I had initially made a test one from a brown paper bag!)

from Hands On As We Grow http://ift.tt/2mRPP22