Things You'll Need:
- "Valentine's Day" written by Anne and Lizzy Rockwell
- Computer/printer, optional
- Paper
- Markers
- Pencil
- Box of conversation hearts
- Rice Krispies cereal & related ingredients for treats
- Tin foil
- Clean funnel
- 2 red & white striped candy canes
- Hot glue gun
- Red construction paper
- Hole punch
- String
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Step 1
Read a book about Valentine's Day with your child. "Valentine's Day" is written by a mother-daughter team and shows how children of different cultures and backgrounds can work together to send a Valentine's Day wish to a friend that lives far away in Japan. Take this opportunity for a social studies lesson teaching your child about children in Japan. See the website in the Resources section for a starting point.
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Step 2
Create a Valentine's Day acrostic poem. Write the letters for Valentine's Day down on a sheet of paper (or you can use a printer to make very fancy fonts), and let your child write a poem using each letter as the start to a new line of the poem. For example, "V"ery happy day; "A"nticipating candy; "L"ove for my family, etc.
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Step 3
Use conversation hearts to help your child with estimation. Have your child guess how many hearts are in one box, and write that number down. Then, your child can open the box and count how many candies are actually there. Next, have your child subtract the two numbers to get a difference. To take math one step further, ask your child to sort the candies by colors and make a bar or pie chart to represent the colors.
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Step 4
As a science component, here is a cooking project. Have your child make candy kisses using Rice Krispies cereal and tin foil. Simply follow the directions for making krispie treats. Use a funnel to push the mixture through to create the shape of a candy kiss. Have your child wrap the kisses in tin foil.
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Step 5
Make a fun craft by taking two candy canes and gluing them together to form a heart. Have your child cut out a heart from red construction paper that will fit along the border of the candy canes. Make a hole punch near the top of the heart and then glue it down to the candy canes. On the front of the heart (not the side that was glued down), have your child write a message. Thread a piece of string through the hole punch to hang up the heart.
