Pattie's Place: Valentines Cards

I love Valentines Day. I like to do lots of crafting in my classroom with a real purpose. If I can get the kids excited about CREATING a really pretty card, then I can encourage them to do some good letter writing going through the writing process, editing, and rewriting, and the whole bit.

Cute Valentine Gifts for my grandkids....

And for my hubs.....

He loves powdered donuts and Klondike bars.

Cookie decorating in my classroom is always fun on Valentines Day.

I used to come up with a prescriptive card. I don't do that anymore. The kids have always come up with something more creative when I let them just take a group of materials and do it their own way. So here is a way to have a LOT of fun, doing some very creative work.

I pass each child out a copied off page of Valentine "clip art" (decorative hearts, cuddly bears, a nice big Happy Valentines Day, cupids, etc.) , a doily of their color choice, construction paper folded in their color choice (pink, purple, red, magenta etc.), some stickers, some foam peel and stick shapes and a candy foil heart. Usually I can find these in a bag of 24 at the grocery store for pretty cheap. I pull out all my Valentine rubber stamps and they can add a few stampings to their cards when they are mostly done.

We make decorated valentine holders and decorate them with all sorts of papers......

Then we write about what we love about ourselves.....

Cute handmade Valentine Holders......

Then I let them go at it. There are some fun tutorials out there that explain fun additions like a heart origami as part of the card. You can find that link here. http://www.craftyartworld.com/origamiheart.php

My only rule is that you have a limit to how much stuff you can put on your card. Tell them 5 or 6 things. Some kids will go a little too crazy. My other rule is you must color the clip art before you cut it out and glue it down.. And a suggestion I make is always to not have a ton of stuff hanging off your paper, because that doesn't look as nice. :) No matter what I say, I still have lots of stuff hanging off the page, but this at least, limits it a bit. :)

After they have designed their front and back we glue gun the chocolate candy hearts to the middle of the doilies. They always turn out beautiful and unique. Then we write our sloppy-copy Valentine letters to mom. I will edit the boo boos and then students get their choice of pretty final writing paper stationery. I usually have 4 designs on 4 colors to complement the cards. The other rules are: 1. very best handwriting, and 2. They have to nicely color the top of the stationery in at least 3 colors.