The month of February brings with it lots of celebrations and traditions. One of such celebrations is Valentines Day. In our toddler room we wanted Valentines Day to focus on friendships between children and engaging in activities they love. One of the toddler’s favourite activities is art, so we decided to focus on Valentine's Day Art that could be done alongside peers in order to promote friendship. The first art activity that we did was making a Valentine's banner with the children. We got a large piece of banner paper and glued on a few paper heart cut-outs. The children were given purple and red paint and invited to paint whatever they wanted on to the banner. Many of the children chose to fill in the paper hearts with the paint. Each child would take a turn filling in the heart and then another peer would add on to the paint that was already there. Through this activity the children got to work on their turn taking and engaged in parallel play alongside their friends, as well as their collaboration skills.
The second activity that we did was gluing tissue paper on to a paper heart. Each child was given a red paper heart and tissue paper to share with their peers. It was wonderful seeing the toddlers looking at each others art to see what their peers were doing and how they were gluing on the paper. The children also did an excellent job of sharing tissue paper pieces between them and helping each other to find the colours that they wanted.
For our last activity we once again used the paper cut outs from the banner activity. White pieces of paper were placed under each of the paper cut outs which were in turn taped down to the table. The children were given purple paint and instructed to paint the heart in. The children started out painting with the paint brush, but finding that they loved the sensory experience of the paint, they also painted it in with their hands. It was great seeing how the children looked around again and saw what their friends were doing, and then tried to mimic what their peers were doing.
Overall, we hope that the children took away the message that Valentine's day is a time to spend with the people you love, and engaging in activities that you love to do.
