Last Minute Valentine's Crafts for Toddlers/Preschoolers

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day!  If you are anything like me, you had grand intentions about the fabulous heart-themed activities and crafts you were going to do with your children, but it is now the day before Valentine's Day and you have not done them yet.  We finally did our first Valentine's art project and made our homemade cards earlier today (nothing like waiting to the last minute!).

For those of you needing a bit of inspiration, I have a compiled a short list of VERY easy projects (with links to blogs that have completed the crafts) to do with your young children today or tomorrow.

Wine cork hearts

Cutting practice with hearts (we did that this year as a part of our homemade Valentine's cards - so easy and a fun way to work on fine motor skills!)

Coloring heart cutouts

Painting or watercoloring heart cutouts

Gluing small pieces of paper onto heart cutouts to make a collage

Heart caterpillars 

Heart footprints

Hearts covered in tissue paper

Elephants made from heart shapes (We did this in our toddler playgroup this morning and the children loved it!)

Heart Valentine paper chain

Heart flowers

Potato print hearts

Handprint heart

Heart butterfly

Toilet tube roll heart stamps

And now that I have compiled this list, I am feeling guilty for not doing more Valentine's Day crafts with my girls.  I have one more day to make it happen!  What fun crafts do you have planned to do with your children this Valentine's Day?

Marla is a former special education teacher, current PhD student, university instructor, and stay-at-home, homeschooling mom of two little girls (ages 2 and 4).  She blogs about homeschooling at Marla's Motherhood Musings and her family's experiences living in Zambia at Our Life in Lusaka.

A Bit of Encouragement

The past few weeks have been rough in our homeschool and in our household.  Things have been crazy and I am just simply overwhelmed.  I feel that I am not doing enough as a mother or a teacher for my children.  I feel that I am not adequately meeting the needs of my amazing husband.  And I feel that my university students are not getting the attention they need and deserve from an instructor.  Basically, I am just feeling like I am failing.

So, I have been praying.  And God revealed something wonderful to me, so wonderful in fact that I think you need to hear it too.  I am doing enough.  I might not be doing everything that I want to do and I may be not be the perfect mother, wife, or teacher.  But, I am who God wants me to be and I am enough.  I am doing exactly what he intends for me to do and so are you.  You are meeting the needs of your family, even when you feel like a failure.

Have a blessed day, my homeschooling friends!  

 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Philippians 4:13



Marla is a former special education teacher, current PhD student, university instructor, and stay-at-home, homeschooling mom of two little girls (ages 2 and 4).  She blogs about homeschooling at Marla's Motherhood Musings and her family's experiences living in Zambia at Our Life in Lusaka.

Planning a Homeschool Year with Pinterest

Are you on Pinterest?


How do you personally use Pinterest?

• Do you pin great ideas to later incorporate into your homeschool lessons?
• Have you pinned full lesson plans or resources?
• Do you pin all of the homeschool ideas onto one board?

Whatever way you use Pinterest, it can be a great organizing tool for homeschoolers. In fact, last year, Sam wrote an article listing ways homeschoolers can use Pinterest to help find and organize ideas. You can read it here. I'll wait.

Personally, I use several of her suggestions. Many of my boards are set up for subjects, units, and special days.

The more I use Pinterest, the more ways I find to use it. I have even started using it to plan our next school year.


Using Pinterest to Plan for an Upcoming School Year

I know it sounds a tad crazy. It is only February and I am planning next school year!

However, I keep running across some great ideas which I want to remember for subjects we will be studying next year.

Not only that, I opted to create curriculum boards for each grade I will be teaching and another for multiple grade classes. On these boards, I pin curriculum or ideas which will be helpful in planning the upcoming school year.

I consider these boards my brainstorming. I add to them when I come across an idea or book I could use. My goal is not to have a million pins, but actual useful-to-me pins.

My plan is to have one place to store all these great ideas. Then, when I do begin the hard work of making actual decisions for next year, I can weed through the pins and decide which ones to include and which ones will not be used.




A word of caution: Pinterest has a lot of ideas and resources. One can easily get swept up in all of it. I try to pin only ideas and resources that my family could actually use and do. Though that trip to Australia does look mighty nice...and it is summer there now...