I Love You Because You’re You
by Robert Munsch has the words, “I’ll love you forever
I’ll like you for always
As long as I’m living
My baby you’ll be.” This book is pretty much a tear-jerker for moms.
Guess How Much I Love You
I Love You Through And Through
You Are My I Love You 
Looking for more ways to say I love you through books?
Valentine’s Day crafts and activities are some of our favorite ways to play. This fun holiday is all about love and fun. Ok, so it’s not a real holiday, and maybe you’re in the camp that it’s a made-up holiday but stores. Pair this chocolate activity with our hot chocolate craft for more fine motor fun.
Whatever your thoughts, you’ve got to admit, the pink and the hearts are a fun way to play after a month of cold wintery snowflakes and all of the red and green December brings. This Valentine’s Day craft was a fun way to create based on one of our favorite Valentine’s Day books, One Zillion Valentines by Frank Modell. And the message is perfect–Valentine’s don’t need to come from a store!
We love this book for it’s fun illustrations, great message, and it’s Valentine’s Day fun. When we read the book recently, we found a few things in the pages that we wanted to craft. We made this Valentine Heart Box of Chocolates on a miniature scale for the cuteness factor and a little imagination play.
This post contains affiliate links.
Reading the book, One Zillion Valentines
shows us the friendship of Martin and Melvin as they trek around town and notice a huge heart shaped chocolate heart in a store window. They decide that Valentines are not just for girls (and that they don’t need to come from a store!)
We started with a cardboard tube. In case you didn’t know, we kind of like cardboard tube crafts.
Shape the tube into a heart shape. Cut two red hearts from red cardstock
Cut the cardboard tube into 1/2 inch thick heart shaped rings. This is a job for an adult, as cutting through the cardboard takes a little muscle.
Cut one of the hearts at the point and snip off a small piece. You will want to tape the heart back together so it is smaller than the other cardboard tube heart and the larger one will fit on top of the smaller heart . The larger heart will be the lid for the bottom heart.
Dip the edges of the hearts into glue and press onto the red cardstock
hearts. Let these dry.
Once dry, you can decorate however you like! We used a piece of ribbon to look like the chocolate heart box in One Zillion Valentines, but you could also draw on heats, flowers, or add bits of ribbon to decorate.
This isn’t the only craft we made based on the book, One Zillion Valentines. We made another fun craft that will be coming your way soon!
This post is part of the Read and Play series where bloggers share crafts and activities based on books. This months post is all about Valentine’s Day books for kids. You can find more creative Valentine activities and crafts all in one place on The Pleasantest Thing.
and check out all of the best and easiest play time activities. We really had a blast with our Magic Foaming Dough, but the pictures in this book really drew us in. The kids kept pointing at each page and saying, “OOOOh, let’s do that!” There are over 150 activities in the book that help develop creativity and skills…all without a screen. I loved the easy directions and the fact that activities were budget friendly. This would be a great gift idea for parents to keep kids engaged, entertained, and learning.
using Kool Aid puffy paint before so when we made this foaming dough, we were ready for the color mixing fun.
We whipped up a batch of magic foaming dough, following the easy directions in the book. We separated the dough into two bowls and added blue food coloring to one bowl and yellow food coloring to the second bowl. These colors looked great next to each other.
Like the directions said, it was dry and crumbly, but completely moldable. We explored the colors and like in Little Blue and Little Yellow, we pretended some of the yellow moved over to the blue, and vise versa.
The kids had fun guessing what color blue and yellow make when combined. (Baby Girl’s guess of It makes PINK!” was received by groans from Big Sister and Little Guy. ((Guess we need to work on the color mixing with Baby Girl…haha!))
“Look it makes GREEN!”
Little Blue and Little Yellow made Little Green.
After the kids played for a while, I told them I had a surprise to make this dough magic. They were SO completely excited! I gave them a squirt bottle of vinegar. (Icing squeeze bottles
It was really neat to see how much this dough foams up. I wasn’t quite expecting such a reaction, but it turned out to be pretty magic for mom, too 😉
It was pretty cool to see the foaming yellow, blue, and green in different areas of our bin.
We had to get our hands in there to play. Big Sister looooooved this! She mixed up the colors even more to make a vivid green color.
Even when the bubbles died down, it was still super fun to play with. The mixture turned into a silky smooth goopy sensory bin. We really found out what happened when little blue and little green gave each other a hug. Just like in the book 🙂
For the recipe to make Magic Foaming Dough, get the 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids book. You won’t regret it!
The pages inspire readers to get involved with the book, mixing colors to make new colors, and then to go off and create. We decided to make sand fingerprint art and mix up our own colors using colored sand. We made art and a colorful candle holder craft that would make a great DIY gift.
The book has colors everywhere, so when we pulled out our rainbow of sand. We were handed down this set, but any rainbow sand set would work for this activity.
We spread out the book on the floor as inspiration and got started. Baby Girl used a little tub of glue to make glue fingerprints on white paper.
This part of the activity alone was mesmerizing for her. She made dots all over the page just like the dots and fingerprints in the book.
Now for the fun part! We added color to the glue fingerprints and started with solid colors. How beautiful is this rainbow of fingerprints?
Then things got interesting! We added dabs of color and mixed up the different colored sands to make different colors.
We really did Mix It Up!
Baby Girl wanted to do footprints with glue, too but we decided our glue tub was too little for whole feet. She ended up making toe prints with glue instead.
After practicing with fingerprints on paper, we moved onto our candle holder craft.
I showed Baby Girl how to make her glue fingerprints onto the side of a mason jar
We covered all of the glue fingerprints with sand.
We made a few candle holders and some ended up more mixed up than others. I love how the colored sand mixed together.
…and by candlelight! We’ll be gifting a few of these candle holders to friends and family. They make a great DIY gift made by kids.
You can see all of our posts in the Preschool Book Club here:
We visit our library at least weekly. Sometimes more. It helps that we live minutes from the building. And that we have a SUPER great library with awesome children’s librarians and programs galore for the kids. And, we just love checking out books. We have our favorites that we always pull from the shelves (Pete the Cat and the Berenstain Bears can almost always be found in our house) and we love checking out new titles, too. SO, our library bag is always overflowing. When we were checking out the links from this week’s Share It Saturday party, we saw a few fun book lists linked up. We had to check them out and share with you! This week is all about books!
Visit the links below for loads of fun, interesting, and unique books to check out this week at the library. Make sure you’ve got an extra large tote bag, because you and the kids are going to be hauling home a bunch of great books!
Books about monsters from Fantastic Fun and Learning
Books about fire trucks from Growing Book By Book
Potty Training books from The Natural Homeschool
Books about fall from Pre-K Pages
Books about the circus from Cutting Tiny Bites
Books about the circus from Sugar Aunts
Books for a new baby from What Do We Do All Day on Sugar Aunts
Books about siblings from Sugar Aunts
Books about Dots from What Do We Do All Day
Books about Kindness from Playdough to Plato
Books about Poop from Still Playing School
Books about Birthdays from The Imagination Tree
Books about Being Different from No Time for Flashcards
Books about Star Wars from Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
Books about Funny Dinosaurs from The Measured Mom
Fox in Socks fine motor rhyming activity from My Bright Firefly
Ten Apples Up on Top counting activity from Teaching Mama
Press Here necklace from Buggy and Buddy
The Very Hungry Caterpillar number flashcards from From ABCs to ACTs
The Duckling Gets a Cookie?! counting chocolate chips activity from 3 Dinosaurs
Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? activities from Living Montessori Now
Some of our favorite books and the activities we’ve done:
.jpg)
and a circle hole punch. I punched a bunch of holes from all of the colors. Little Guy (age 5) LOVED helping me with the hold punching. Fun stuff!
We pushed, pulled, and poked the dots just like in the book. Be sure to talk about the colors while playing. This is a great sensory bin to work on color identification. Sensory play and learning go hand in hand, and this is a great way to learn and play.
For more Press here activities, check out the ideas listed below. Each Press Here book activity uses the concepts in the book, the fun colors of the dots, and lots of pressing!
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.
Make a Kissing Hand craft to help kids with separation anxiety when they go back to school or have to leave parents and feel a bit nervous.
, but I couldn’t fine mine
I poured a pile of red glitter that we received from www.craftprojectideas.com onto a plate.
Big Sister helped me to pat, sprinkle, and dab the glitter onto the dough. Pat a bit of water onto the dough first to get the glitter to really stick well.
. Big Sister helped me paint both sides of the heats with the nail polish.
Stop by and see the other The Kissing Hand activities in the Preschool Book Club series:
Looking for books for a new baby? This list of the best baby books are great for infants and babies, and some of the books are great for toddlers with a new baby sibling in the house. Add these baby book ideas to your list of baby play!
We’re so excited to have Erica from What Do We Do All Day here to guest post for us! She’s put together a wonderful list of books for new babies. Perfect timing for the new baby in our house!
I’m delighted to be here on The OT Toolbox while Colleen settles down with her new baby! One of the best starts a parent can give their child is to read to him or her from day 1. Reading aloud builds literacy, offers comfort and helps baby’s brain develop! On What Do We Do All Day? I offer parents a new book list every Monday and I’d love to share with readers five of my favorite books to read to a new baby.
Please note: this list contains affiliate links that support this blog and the new baby’s diaper habit!
A new parent can’t go wrong with any of Sandra Boynton’s books, but Tickle Time! is particularly fun. Babies love to hear rhymes and repetition and Boynton supplies all that and more.
Purchase the board book edition of the classic Goodnight Moon because you will be reading this one again and again. You may remember the “great green room” and the “red balloon” from your own childhood. Share them with your little one and you’ll soon be able to recite this one from memory.
Ten, Nine, Eight Board Book by Molly Bang is near the top of my list of all time favorite books for babies. It’s a gentle, rhyming lullaby about a girl getting ready for bed with her father. I love it so much, I’ve put it on several of my book lists, including a list of 15 multicultural books for babies and toddlers.
Babies love looking at faces and any of the Look! Baby books, such as Baby Faces makes a great addition to your new baby library. When reading the book, take your time and point to all the body parts on the faces and then touch the corresponding parts on your own baby’s face. This will help teach him a sense of self and how to read emotions.
Tana Hoban’s Black & White series of board books are perfect for little eyes which are attracted to contrast more than color. Pointing out familiar objects will increase babies vocabulary and their understanding of the world around them.
I hope these books encourage you to read everyday to your baby so matter how young he or she is. Here’s a tip from me: if you get bored of baby books, pick up your own reading and simply read aloud. It doesn’t matter that your child will not understand, Baby will simply love hearing your voice.
What are your favorite books for a new baby?
Erica is a theater geek turned stay-at-home mom with an obsession with children’s books and easy indoor activities, which she chronicles on her blog, What Do We Do All Day?. She makes book lists, drinks chai, plays board games and explores New York City with her two boys.
