January 25, 2013

We are so excited for today’s post! Katie from Live Craft Eat is here to guest post and she has such a cute Valentine’s Day activity and decoration to share. I know you’ll love it!

Katie Heap is a full time mom and part time blogger at Live Craft Eat. She blogs about crafts, yummy food and much more. If she’s not blogging or being a Mom she’s probably watching Downton Abbey and eating Nutella ice cream late at night.

Even though it’s still January  I’ve had Valentine’s Day on my mind. Maybe because it gives me something other than the cold weather and snow to think about, or maybe it’s because I just love chocolate and flowers, but either way, I’ve been gathering ideas and thinking up my own things for what I can do to make this holiday fun for my kids.

Since my kids love matching games, I thought it would be fun to make a heart matching game for them. but not just different colored hearts…no, that would be too easy for them (but if your kids are really little then that would be perfect!). I used papers with different patterns and then cut out different-sized hearts just so they’d have to think about it a little bit more. You can make your own hearts, or use this printable here.

Once you have your templates cut out, trace out as many hearts as you can! If you don’t want to use them for a decoration, but would rather keep them year after year, consider using patterned cardstock or laminating them. And also be sure, no matter what paper/cardstock you use, that you trace the same size heart on the same paper twice. It is a matching game, after all!

Love me a pile of paper hearts.

Then let the matching begin! I quizzed them a few times at the beginning – giving them 2 different sizes of the same pattern and asking them if they matched and why or why not, etc.

After a couple of examples, they did a great job matching the right ones together!

Once we matched all the hearts, we used the matches to make a decoration to hang on our window. We cut 3 long lengths of string and taped one of each set of matches to them.

Then we took a glue stick and glued the other hearts to their matches.

Hang them at the top of a window! It really does make our house look Valentine-y. And yes, it was blindingly sunny when i took these pictures….

And a part of this that I love (we hung ours on a window that has TONS of sunlight coming through it all day long) is that it makes heart shadows all over my kitchen! And depending on the time of day, it makes a pathway of hearts that my kids like to play “hopscotch” on!

When daddy came home from work, my kids were so excited to tell him about the matching game they played and how they had put their matches on the window! It looks so pretty I may not take it down after Valentine’s Day….

Thanks Kirstylee and Cassidy for having me over today!

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