Love Bug Craft

If you are searching for a Valentine’s Day occupational therapy activity, then a love bug craft ideas is it. These love bug Valentine crafts are beyond cute, but they are also powerful fine motor crafts that help kids develop, refine, and strengthen fine motor skills. Check out the craft ideas below and choose one that strengthens the skills you are specifically looking to improve.

Love bug craft ideas for kids that help to build fine motor skills with a love bug valentines craft theme.

Love Bug Craft

The hardest part about setting up these cute bug crafts is to decide which to make. I wanted to pull together some love bug craft ideas from around the net to help you find exactly the craft that helps kids develop specific fine motor skills.

When kids work on crafts like the ones described here, they have the opportunity to build many fine motor skills that are needed for tasks like handwriting, manipulating and managing clothing fasteners, coloring with endurance, manipulating toys and materials in play, and participating in daily tasks with coordination. Here are some fine motor skills that love bug crafts can help kids develop and refine:

  • Precision and dexterity
  • Eye-hand coordination
  • Pinch and grip strength
  • Separation of the sides of the hands
  • Arch development
  • Endurance and strength
  • Open thumb web space
  • Finger isolation

Is there anything cuter than a Love Bug craft for kids?  These Valentine’s Day love bug crafts would make a great activity for school parties, play dates, or any day leading up to Valentine’s Day!    

Love bug crafts for kids this Valentine's Day

Love Bug Valentine Crafts

This Sticky play love bugs from Best Toys 4 Toddlers pairs the fine motor power of stickers with a cute bug craft. When kids peel and place stickers, they are building precision and neat pincher grasp that is needed for dexterity in tasks. read more about the benefits of playing with stickers here.


This Pine Cone Love Bugs from Fireflies & Mudpies helps kids build hand strength and bilateral coordination. By manipulating and twisting pipe cleaners, children can develop the skills needed for handwriting, cutting with scissors, and manipulating clothing fasteners like shoe laces.

While this bee craft is considered an insect, it still works as a cute love bug! Use this bee craft idea to help kids work on precision, bilateral coordination, open thumb web space, and separation of the sides of the hand as they peel and stick bandages to make a bee.


An Egg carton love bugs craft from Kitchen Floor Crafts is a fun way to help children with precision and eye-hand coordination as they thread pipe cleaners into egg cartons and beads onto pipe cleaners. This precision task develops arch strength, separation of the sides of the hand, and an open thumb web space, all of which are needed for a functional pencil grasp.


There is power in play dough! This Play Dough Love Bugs from Fantastic Fun and Learning uses play dough to create love bug crafts in a fine motor activity that kids will love. When children play with play dough, and better yet, add manipulatives to play dough, they are building so many fine motor skills. Work on precision, eye-hand coordination, tripod grasp, and more with this fun love bug craft.

Love bug caterpillar craft made from a painted egg carton with string legs to help kids develop fine motor skills.

Make this caterpillar craft using an egg carton, and work on eye-hand coordination, hand strength, bilateral coordination skills, and much more.


These Cork Love Bugs from No Time For Flashcards are a cute way to work on neat pincer grasp as kids manipulating and place the small craft pieces. It’s a powerful eye-hand coordination activity, too.


These Fingerprint Love Bugs from I Heart Arts and Crafts help kids with scissor skills, bilateral coordination, and finger isolation. These fine motor skills carry over into many functional tasks.

Although ants are in the insect line, these ant crafts are great ways to build fine motor skills, too.

Extend the bug theme with this visual closure bug activity that helps kids develop visual perceptual skills needed for reading and writing.

And for more hands-on bug pretend play, make a quick bug sensory bin. This fine motor activity helps kids with pouring, scooping, and manipulating sensory bin materials with their hands. Pair the bug sensory bin with a Valentine’s sensory bin and you’ve got yourself a love bug theme!

Want more Valentine’s Day Activities that help build motor skills?

The Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit is here! This printable kit is 25 pages of hands-on activity sheets designed to build skills in pinch and grasp strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, precision, dexterity, pencil control, handwriting, scissor skills, coloring, and more.

When you grab the Valentine’s Day Fine Motor Kit now, you’ll get a free BONUS activity: 1-10 clip cards so you can challenge hand strength and endurance with a counting eye-hand coordination activity.

Valentines Day fine motor kit

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.

 

 

 
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