Caroline
{This post contains affiliate links, read our Disclosure Policy for more information.}
First one up is this heart matching tray.
I punched matching pairs of hearts out of 8 different pieces of scrapbook paper with a heart punch. I bought my heart punch at Michael’s with a 40% off coupon. Then I punched 16 more hearts out of red cardstock paper and glued them to the back of all the hearts.
I laid them all out on the tray in even rows and my daughter was ready to play a matching game. She played over and over and really enjoyed it.
Second up is our counting tray. To set it up I laid down 10 floral blocks (purchased in packs of 4 at Dollar Tree). On the floral blocks I taped down a red heart and glued a white circle on it. The circles were numbered and dotted 1-10. My daughter is still working on recognizing all of her numbers so I wanted to give her both the number and dotted option. You will also need push pins. I bought these cute pink flag pushpins in the Target dollar section. You will need 55 pushpins.
The purpose of the tray is to recognize or count the number on the the heart, and put that many pushpins in the square block.
It turns out to be counting and fine motor practice. 🙂 And my daughter LOVED getting to push all 55 pushpins into the blocks. (*Since pushpins have sharp ends this activity must be completed under adult supervision.)
This is what it looked like after my daughter finished pushing in all the pins.
She also had a lot of fun removing the pins and putting them back in the container for me. I thought I would show you an after picture of one use. I think you could easily get several uses from one set up. I thought I would mention that if you have a preschool and are wanting to use this on several children.
I also set up a letter recognition activity to help her with her name recognition. I reused our letters from our bunting activity last week for this. I glued small felt hearts to 16 medium sized clothespins and wrote each letter on the clothespins 4 times.
I arranged the letters on the tray in random order and my daughter had to match up the clothespins to the correct letter in her name.
For fine motor practice, we also threaded heart marshmallows onto toothpicks. (*Toothpicks have sharp edges so use caution with this activity with young children and always supervise children while doing this activity!)
I have to say this was by far my daughter’s most favorite thing we did all week. She helped me make doughnut snowman around Christmas time by threading doughnuts on skewers so I wasn’t surprised that she loved this so much. She kept asking for more marshmallows.
To continue working on our name recognition and also to practice with our glue skills, I set up this tray for her to cover her name in heart sequins.
Learning how to control the amount of glue you need is such a hard skill to get down in preschool so making these long thin lines was such great practice for her. After she put glue on a letter, she went down the line covering it with heart sequins. I purchased these heart sequins at either Dollar Tree or the Target dollar section. I apologize for not remembering which one. I bought things at both places last week and bags got combined so I just can’t remember anymore.
Who doesn’t love seeing their name covered in pretty hearts?!! Just FYI, I printed her name out using the Print Clearly Font which you can download for free HERE. I used 600 font size, but that’s obviously going to depend on the length of your child’s name.
I couldn’t leave you without mentioning this lovely book that we have been reading this book to go along with our activity trays, 1-2-3 Valentine’s Day by Jeanne Modesitt.
. If you have a young one learning numbers and counting, it is an awesome book for Valentine’s Day. It also has some rhyming text in it which makes me love it even more. Each page has hearts on it for counting as you read along in the story. You must check it out!
If you missed our Activity Trays last week, check them out HERE.
Follow I Heart Crafty Things on Facebook, Pinterest,
Google+, Twitter, and Instagram!
(function() {
var po = document.createElement(‘script’); po.type = ‘text/javascript’; po.async = true;
po.src = ‘https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();
