Our Valentine party was a blast this year! I'm not a huge fan of commercial holidays, but I happen to love Valentine's Day. If you get rid of the pressure to buy silly things for people that they don't need and drop the romantic Hollywood "love" bit,  it's possible to make the day just about one important thing we all need more of : LOVE.  Why not have a day to celebrate love and how it exists around us. Sure, we should do that everyday, but I vote for having a day that's devoted to remembering all of the love in our lives. 

Today we focused our activities around some central questions:

How can we teach our students and children to express love?  
How can we make sure our students know they are loved?  


I teach a good amount of sign language here. I'm proficient in American Sign Language and think it to be a complex and beautiful language that everyone would benefit from learning. it also gives students a kinesthetic way to express themselves when they can't get the words to come out! One of the activities I set up was a sign language "I LOVE YOU" hand that I found on Pinterest (with no website link). If anyone knows who originally came up with please add the link!

They each traced their own hand independently, so some of them came out beautifully wonky. I love looking at them hanging on the walls, it warms my heart!

Another of our activities involved some Math Play!  Each student received a small container of conversation hearts that they sorted by color. After sorting them on the graph they took off the hearts (each got to eat one) and colored in the bar graph with the appropriate color.  Each of the students was able to identify how many of each color they had simply by looking at the graph. They were also able to identify Most, Least and Equal!

Some chose to practice their cutting skills, moving away from straight lines and cutting out hearts.  This brought about more Math Play through discussions on symmetry as we cut out half a heart on folded paper to make a full heart with two symmetrical sides. 

Student then tried to copy the words from the conversation candy hearts onto their paper hearts. A few needed hand over hand assistance, but most were able to do it independently. It was a fun Early Literacy lesson.



We have a good amount of large easel paper slathered in paint from the first few weeks of school before they actually started to try to paint pictures and were just all about putting as much paint on the canvas as they could. I took some pinking shears and cut hearts out of a few of those paintings and had them out while the kids went between activities. I sat there and waited as they came up to be one by one and we talked about who loved them and who they loved back. We decided to express some of those emotions on the backs of the hearts I had cut out as as they dictated their notes. We stuck all of our Valentine's to a string and hung them at the door for the families to read when they arrived for pick up. My favorite was one that a student wrote to his dog, Pumpkin:
     Pumpkin,
    I think you talk.
    I'll give you a treat when I get home.
    Love,
    W.

Of course, it wouldn't be a real post if I didn't talk about food, now would it? What says love more than cooking together? We spent the rest of the morning baking gingerbread (by student request) and the afternoon decorating and eating them. We made an improvised gluten-free gingerbread recipe:

3-1/2 cups Pamela's Gluten-Free Bread Mix 
2 TBS ground cinnamon 
1 tsp baking powder 
2 TBS ground ginger 
1/3 cup unsalted butter or margarine
1/2 cup  brown sugar
1 egg
1 to 2 tbsp water

Now, this is real preschool art, not art Martha Stewart made to be picture perfect for everyone on Pinterst. This is Preschool Food Art made withLOVE :)  Spreading the frosting gave them some fine motor skill development, as did the decorating. I was impressed that they remembered where the heart was in the body (from our trip to the vet) and as you can clearly see, the alien gingie with hearts for eyes: he's in love.  

Overall, it was a joyful day filled with learning and play and play and learning and more play. I hope that each of them went home and told someone they love them. That would make it perfect.