We were looking for a game to play during the 1st grade Valentine’s Day party at school and decided on a version of Valentine’s Day Bingo. I printed out blank grids (created them in Photoshop but they can easily be made in Excel or other programs, too) then went old-school and finished them by hand since that seemed a bit more fun for the little kids. Our daughter helped come up with the ideas for each square.
The kids had a blast playing Valentine’s Day Bingo during the party at school.
The numbers on the bingo card were the answers to simple math problems (2+2, 5+5, etc.) and it was fun hearing the kids shout out the answers when the math problems were called out during our game. We used heart-shaped candies as the bingo “pieces.”
I picked up a couple of puzzles and some coloring books from the store and those served as our prizes. This was a great addition to our school festivities! We collected the cards afterwards and are using these at home and at next year’s classroom party.  🙂
One cool thing about taking a hiatus from working full-time in corporateland is having a little more time to work on some arts & crafts projects with my first-grader. We always made homemade Valentines in the past, but we were in less of a time crunch this year. Since the wee girl is getting older, she’s much more interested in helping out with the designs of our projects, too, so that added an extra layer of fun this year.
I picked up some 4″ x 6″ pastel card stock & some adorable papers by Doodlebug Design at the art supply store, as well as some Valentine’s stickers — hearts, owls & forest animals — for our little animal lover. I also pulled out our containers of stamps so she could pick a few to use.
The card design our 7-year-old came up with was fairly straight-forward — she wanted strips of the patterned paper to act as  a branch going across the bottom section of the solid card stock. We adhered those strips to the paper using double-sided craft tape.
I helped her cut wavy edges – she can do it herself now that she’s older but it takes her awhile and since we were making 30 cards or so, I pitched in.
After that, she started applying the various animal stickers & added some stamps (mostly butterflies, moons & cats) and used a “Friend” stamp on all of them. For the cards that she felt needed an extra-special touch, she drew some stars and hearts.
Simple, yet super cute!
I also showed her a stamping technique where we used markers to color the stamps instead of the stamping ink pads — this way she was able to make a multi-colored stamp or “fade” as she called it. She liked using this method on the “Friend” stamp.
Using markers instead of a stamp pad gives an extra zing when using stamps. A simple technique that young children can do.
Best part of this project was how proud she was of the cards she made. This was a great winter-weekend project that even some of the youngest school-age kids can tackle.
It is crazy how quickly this school year is flying – the wee girl’s 100th day of 1st grade is today. She had an assignment to bring in a poster pertaining to the 100th day of school. I popped on Pinterest to spark some ideas and found an adorable project concept on South Shore Mamas. We played with the general idea from the image they shared and added a few twists of our own.
Our girl thought it would be fun to number each of the hearts 1-100. They’ve been writing their numbers 0-1,000 on worksheets at school over these last couple of weeks, so the timing of this was perfect for a little more practice.
After that, we started on the poster. She wanted to color in the letters for the title at the top. I helped draw the letters for her & she chose the colors & colored them in.
Similar to the version on South Shore Mamas, we used the outline of her hand as the branches for the tree. She didn’t want to color the bark, but wanted to make sure to add bluebirds as well as a hole in the tree with an owl’s eyes peeking out. Using the numbered heart stickers, she randomly applied them around the tree trunk as the leaves.
Once the stickers were in place, she decided to draw a deer eating leaves & a flower at the bottom of the poster board. This was a great winter-weekend project & inexpensive, too. Found the bag of stickers at the dollar store for $1 and the poster board for 50-cents. She also liked that we used the hearts since this is Valentine’s week, too.
