Homemade Valentines - A Kindy Craft

When it comes to holidays, my oldest daughter thinks the entire house needs to be redecorated at every opportunity. Valentines is coming up and we never just send the 'fill your name in' kind. We try to use the holiday as an opportunity to sit at the table and craft together. It is these little moments I find out that my daughter misses her old school, that she loves her new gym teacher and that French is her favourite subject. I see my daughter everyday but sometimes we are so busy shuffling from one event to the next we do not really talk. Also, she is only five so sometimes the only thing she wants to talk about is eating leftover Halloween treats or negotiating more TV time. That doesn't mean homemade valentines needs to take hours or cost a lot of money.

I asked Chloe what she wanted on her Valentines this year, she declared it had to be pandas! Not just any pandas, she wanted pandas with hearts and smiles. A quick google search and I had hundreds of cartoon pandas to choose from, ready to be edited and printed out.

I really love the program "Picasa" you can download it for free here: https://picasa.google.com/ I used this program to edit a few images of pandas that Google had supplied, imposed Chloe's name on them and made a little background. I then printed three to a sheet so that there was room to fold over the paper to make a card. Regular printer paper is just fine because the double layer will be strong enough to hold the treat we selected.

I purchased some chocolate hearts at the store, I loved the purple foil (purple is Chloe and I's favourite colour). They purple looked great with the green background on our panda cards. I bought some snack sized zip bags for less than two dollars and placed two purple hearts in each one. Then we folded the closed zip bag in half and staples our paper on top.
Chloe embellished the valentines with stickers and drew smiles on her pandas (remember she wanted them to have smiles).

This whole project took less than an hour, and cost less that five dollars. Now we get to send our homemade valentines to school and Chloe can feel proud that she put a little extra effort in for her friends!

A tip for fellow kindy parents is to not worry about putting the friends names on the valentines. If you make them all similair, put your own child's name, they can simply drop one in every friends bag without the worry that you forgot someone!