Assignment #5: Create Valentine’s Day Cards

Valentine’s Day provides us with a great opportunity to strengthen family relationships by making hand written cards that tell our family members how much we love them. Turn it into a family event by making the cards together! This activity is especially fun for young kids, who get an opportunity to be creative and to express themselves through art.

What you’ll need

Colorful construction paper, tissue paper, ribbons, markers, maybe stencils if you want to trace and cut really nice heart shapes – but don’t be a perfectionist about it! Results are never as important as the process itself when doing crafts with kids.

What you definitely won’t need

Store-bought cards. The idea is to make hand-written cards with an emphasis on writing from your heart rather than relying on pre-written text. There’s nothing inherently wrong with store-bought cards, of course, but they are just not as personal or as unique as handmade cards.

 

How to do it

Simple!

Cut out three heart shapes in different sizes from different types of paper such as red construction paper, gift-wrap paper and colorful tissue paper and glue them to each other, the large heart at the bottom and the small on top. Attach a small envelope with your Valentine’s Day message inside using a red ribbon, then fold to create a card.

Your Valentine’s Day card doesn’t have to be heart-shaped of course – little boys will probably prefer different colors and shapes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a dinosaur-shaped Valentine’s Day card!

As for the message inside the card, encourage the kids to think for a while about what they want to say to the recipient. The goal is to try to avoid generic messages and instead try to come up with a more personal message that really lets the other person know how much you love them and what it is that you love about them.

For example, instead of “I love you dad, Happy Valentine’s Day, Ethan” a personal message could say:

“Dear Dad, I love playing baseball with you. Thank you so much for teaching me all kinds of sports and especially for teaching me to focus on the game itself and not so much on winning. Love, Ethan.”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Photo by Cláudia Assad