Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Valentine's past

I'm a little off this week. I had planned to do a tutorial for our Valentine's but with the snow yesterday and a delayed start to school (which means no morning Kindergarten), it threw me off. Instead we scrambled for some fun activities in the snow. So hopefully tomorrow I can get the tutorial written for our fun Valentine project.

I thought today we would look at previous Valentines fun.

N's first Valentine's exchange: We love making our own crayons out of scraps of old used up crayons so that was the plan for the first preschool exchange. N collected, chopped and mixed all the left over crayon scraps and placed them in our mold. We use an old muffin tin for these kinds of projects. I placed the tin in the oven for a short time and they melted together nicely. After they cooled we popped them out. I did melt some separately and pour them into a heart candy mold and then used those for extra special friends outside school. In the meantime, N cut out hearts from paper he had already colored or painted and then wrote his name on the back of each heart. The crayons were mounted to the hearts with raised tape (thicker than regular tape - I'm sure scrapbookers know the actual name for it). Voile!

N's second Valentine exchange: We seem to always have left over crayons or parts of reused crayons (as in above idea) collecting. I admit I have difficulty throwing away things I know we can reuse. So this idea came from an activity I did with my preschool students when working at Wisconsin School for the Deaf. First we took waxed paper and laid it out on an old towel. N sprinkled the left over crayons on the waxed paper and arranged the parts how he wanted it. I covered the first piece with another piece of waxed paper and an old washcloth (kinda see through worked best). I ran my warm iron over the paper to seal the edges and then melt the crayons. It only took a minute. Then I set those aside to completely cool. After they were cool I traced hearts on the paper and my son cut them out. The last step was punching a hole in the top and stringing ribbon to hang. He attached a small label with his name on it. They look beautiful hanging in the window.

So what for this year? I'll share as soon as the finished project dries :)

Take some time to show your kids how much you love them this Valentines Day....do a project with them - no don't just watch them do it, do it with them. They will remember.

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