Valentines Hearts and Handprints

A slightly brighter day today – in fact we managed to play out in the garden for half an hour this morning, and had to shut the living room curtain as the sun was blinding us all for a while!

Today we were putting the finishing touches to things we started earlier this week, so most of it was done by me. The kids played with their toy kitchen a lot today, with their Melissa and Doug pizza set, their paper mache pizza and making me ‘cakes’ from playdough. Harrison is getting to the age now where he really enjoys role play and pretending. A plastic seat is all he needs to become a train driver, a little bag and he’s off to play with his market so keep an eye out for future posts about role play!

On Tuesday when we made our Valentines Biscuits, we also made our salt dough. For those of you who have never made it before, it’s really easy and can be used to make all sorts of things.

You will need:
1 cup salt
1 cup flour
1/2 cup water

It doesn’t matter how big the cup is as long as you stick to this ratio.
Mix all ingredients in a bowl until it forms a firm dough.

Harrison and Alex then had great fun rolling it out using their little rolling pins, and using heart shaped playdough/cookie cutters cut out heart shapes.

We then poked a little hole through them with one of our playdough tools, but a pencil or a straw would do the trick. I didn’t get a photo of the hearts at this point as my camera battery died, but we then placed them into a silicone baking tray. These can be left to air dry but takes several days. We popped ours in the bottom of the oven whilst our biscuits cooked, and then left them in the oven at a low temperature for a couple of hours. By this point it was too late to do any thing with them so they have been left until today.

We got out shades of red and pink paint and painted one side of them and left to dry. It dried fairly quickly as the dough absorbs the paint but does soften them just a little. We then turned them over and painted the other side.

Once they dried we threaded string through the holes we had made and hung them on the wall. When our ‘love’ week has finished these will make lovely little gifts!

On Monday, after painting their cardboard hearts for sewing (see what we did here), the kids painted their hands, something that they do every time the paint comes out! Whilst they played pizza shops today, I turned them into these:

This came from various ideas and pictures I’d saw on Pinterest and Facebook.
It was really easy to make – on red and pink card I drew a big heart with a black felt tipped pen. I stuck the handprint in the middle of the heart. With older kids it would look better with the handprint stamped directly onto the paper, but with toddlers it usually takes at least two attempt to get a decent print so is easier to do it on a separate sheet! I then handwrote the little poem, which is one I saw on Facebook but adapted the wording slightly.

Here’s the poem enlarged – excuse my rubbish handwriting!!

A lovely little present for someone on Valentines Day!