How to Make Valentines with Your Kids

Member

By chameleon
User-Submitted Article

Article Rating: (5 Ratings)

Making handmade Valentines with your kids is a great way to spend quality time with them.

Making handmade Valentines with your kids is a great way to save money AND spend quality time with your kids at the same time. You can spark their creativity and have a lot of fun with homemade Valentines.

This Valentine How-to will help you get started making handmade Valentines with your kids. Once you've assembled a Valentine making kit, you can pull it out for any holiday and turn Valentine making with your kids into an annual tradition.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Tupperware or Rubbermaid box to hold your Valentine making kit
Construction paper in red, white, black and pink
Safety scissors
White, silver and gold lace doilies
Glitter
Elmers School Glue
Cellophane tape
Cookie cutters
Crepe paper
Tissue paper

Step 1

Take stock of your Valentine making supplies.

Before you go shopping for Valentines and Valentine making supplies, take stock of what you have at home. Use the Things You'll Need list as a guide for assembling your own Valentine making kit. Grab a Rubbermaid storage box or a large Tupperware container and start filling it with construction paper, wrapping paper scraps, paper doilies and other crafting papers and supplies. Don't forget to check your baking drawer for heart-shaped cookie cutters and other stencil supplies.
Step 2

Go shopping for cheap Valentine making supplies.

If you don't have enough craft supplies at home to make fancy Valentines with your kids, it's time for a trip to your local dollar store. You'll be amazed at the variety of Valentine's themed stuff you can pick up on the cheap. For less than you'd pay for a box of storebought Valentines, you can buy enough supplies for all of your kids to make Valentines for their entire class - and they'll be completely unique!

Look for - Valentines Day stickers, Cupid stickers, Heart stickers, Candy Heart stickers, paper lace doilies (in the baking department), Holiday cookie cutters, cheap school glue. When you get it home, add it to your Valentine making kit.
Step 3

Get your kids excited about making their own Valentines.

It's all in the publicity! Don't just pull out the Valentine kit one evening. Talk it up for a few days beforehand. Let your kids see you adding Valentine making supplies to the kit and talk about how much fun you'll have making Valentines together. Building anticipation really does help make things more fun - and will make your Valentine making session the first year of a family tradition.
Step 4

Break out the Valentine making kit the weekend before Valentine's Day.

Don't wait till the night before. Give yourself and your kids a whole afternoon to play with Valentines - trust me, once they get started, they'll be reluctant to put it all away and go to bed. If you start on the Saturday or Sunday afternoon before Valentines Day, you'll have time to finish up the Valentines you started after school later in the week.
Step 5

Teach basic Heart-making skills or cut out hearts if necessary.

Start with the most basic Valentine making skill - cutting out a proper Valentine heart. Your older children may have learned to do this at school, but many younger children get frustrated trying to cut out symmetrical Valentine hearts. Show them how to fold a sheet of paper in half, draw out half a heart and cut on the line. Let them practice with different sizes and colors - they'll use up all the hearts when they start gluing and stacking Valentine hearts.
Step 6

Teach them how to make a basic Valentine for "kids in my class".

The simplest version of a handmade Valentine is a cutout heart embellished with heart stickers and glitter. Have your kids cut out Valentine heart bases for each kid in the class. Make different size hearts in pink,red, white and black construction paper and show them how to layer different sized construction paper hearts to make shadow Valentines. Use lace doilies between two cutout hearts to make a lacy Valentine.
Step 7

Encourage creativity for special Valentines for teachers and best friends.

There are so many ways to customize cutout construction paper Valentines - and your kids may just surprise you by coming up with some ideas that you hadn't considered. Let them use cookie cutters as stencils, and encourage them to write in glue then sprinkle with glitter for shimmering signatures and "Be My Valentine" text.
Step 8

Provide each kid with a shoebox or manila envelope to store and carry their Valentines.

See the article below on how to make a gift bag from a manila envelope. Encourage them to decorate their Valentine carrier. They can use their decorated bag to carry Valentines to school - and to cart home their own Valentines at the end of the day!
Step 9

Don't forget the cleanup.

Make cleaning up after making Valentine making a part of the activity. Store any leftover cutout hearts and scraps in an envelope for next year. Give out candy hearts as prizes for the kid that cleans up their space the fastest or the best, and assign one kid to wash the table when you're all done.