Preschool Valentines

Valentine’s Day is Saturday which means preschool Valentine’s Day party is Thursday.  Last night we let our older son stay up a little later after dinner to help put together his valentines for his classmates.  I knew I wanted to do a no-candy valentine and there are tons of ideas on Pinterest.  I also knew I wanted something simple and inexpensive.  I settled on something like this:

Pinterest is a rabbit hole when it comes to finding out who did the original design so I can give credit where credit is due.  After clicking through multiple blogs I finally got down to the original source: Dandee-Designs.  As you will soon see, ours looked NOTHING like the original.

I could’ve done a cute printable.  I could’ve done the entire thing myself and left my son out of it.  It would’ve been a lot faster.  But where’s the fun in that?  Then it becomes just another thing to cross off a to do list.  So last night we sat down and tackled putting together 14 valentines.

I previously bought the bouncy balls at Party City for 49 cents each.  To start, my son helped take off the little cellophane wrapper and put each ball in a bag.

I decided to hand write the tags because I thought it would be more personal.  And my printer is actually broken.  😉

I cut sheets of red cardstock into fourths and then folded them in half to make the tops for the bags.  On one side I wrote “Have a BALL this Valentine’s Day!” and on the other side I wrote “Your friend,”.  Then I let my son write his name on all of them. This was a great name-writing practice activity!  They’ve been working on it a lot at preschool and he did really well on some of them.  Then there was this one:

If you know his name you’ll know that is not even close.  I pushed all my Type A feelings aside and just tried to go with the flow.

After name-writing we then decorated the tags with stickers and put the bags together with the stapler.  He did the sticker part and I did the stapling part.

The preschool teachers gave us a sheet with all the kids names in these little cards that we could cut out and attach to the valentines.  We stuck ours inside the bag with the ball with the names facing out (that’s the little red card behind the ball).  So for each ball my son picked out a card and then decorated the tag to go with it.  This was actually really fun because it gave us a chance to talk about each boy or girl and what stickers they might like on their valentine.

Yes the stickers are stars and smiley faces and not hearts but that’s all we had in the craft drawer.

I’m really happy with how they turned out!  I like the handwritten, homemade vibe.  And now I know for sure that even if another mom/kid does the “have a ball” valentines they won’t look exactly the same as ours.  I mean everyone is on Pinterest so chances are pretty high that there’s a duplicate.

I’m also glad I took the time to do this project together with my son (and that I actually planned ahead enough in advance to do so!).  The whole thing only took about an hour and he seemed to enjoy it.  I know I enjoyed the time together.