Valentine Celebration Ideas

Cooking with heart shapes

Have fun with your food on Valentine’s Day. How many ways can you take your favorite foods and shape them into hearts? Cutting a piece of bread into a heart is pretty easy, so serve heart-shaped toast for breakfast, or heart-shaped sandwiches for lunch. For snacks, lay out small bites of food into a heart shape on a plate--a border of banana slices in the shape of a heart with raisins filling the center, perhaps. Use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to make heart shaped cookies then have fun decorating them. Or be more creative with your cookie-cutter. Make mini heart-shaped peanut butter sandwiches using a cookie-cutter, or cut up a pizza with your cookie-cutter. If you’re making your own pizza, place the pepperoni and other toppings in concentric heart shapes.

Crafts

Have your kids invite friends over to make crafts for Valentines Day. Depending on the types of crafts appropriate for your child, pick up pink, red and white versions of materials like tissue paper, construction paper and beads. With the beads, the children can string together bracelets, rings or necklaces. You can pre-cut heart shapes with the construction paper or let the children do it. With the paper hearts, children can make personal valentine cards for friends or family, or glue multiple hearts together and make garlands of hearts. Tissue paper “florets” can be glued onto the hearts. Make them by cutting the tissue into 1” squares, then twist around the end of a pencil eraser and attach to the construction paper with a dot of glue.

Party Games

Invite kids over for a party and play popular games with a Valentine twist. Instead of Pin the tail on the donkey, you can pin the arrow on the heart. (Make these out of construction paper.) Purchase candy conversation hearts and see who can build the tallest tower in 2 minutes. Or use the candy to make a scavenger hunt by hiding the candy then assigning each child a different color to see who can find the most of their assigned color in a given time. Use the candy conversation hearts to drop into a milk bottle. The kids take turns dropping 10 candy pieces from 2-3 feet over the bottle and see how many they can get into the bottle. Winners of the games can get heart-shaped prizes.