Party of 5: Candy Heart Art Project

Valentine's Day is a funny holiday. I have never been a big fan of it. It always seemed so commercialized, but now that I have the kids I love finding fun projects to do with them and fun ways to celebrate Valentine's Day with them. Scott and I have never been Valentine's Day people. We don't go out, we don't do gifts, etc. We're very exciting lol!

This project, however, is very exciting and very cute! You only need 3 things and it's not messy! The kids had a great time and while it was created as an art project for Valentine's Day, we were working on lots of skills in the process (fine motor skills, shapes, patterns, colors, letter recognition, etc).

What you need:
~ Small candy conversation hearts in a small bowl
~ Glitter glue (silver would work best)
~ Construction paper (pink or red)

What to do:

Let your child pick what color paper he/she would like. All of mine picked pink. Start by tracing a large heart on the construction paper for your child.

Once the heart is on the paper have your child trace the heart using their bottle of glue. If you have a younger child you may need to help them with this. I would suggest tracing half the heart with glue at a time.

Next, have your child start putting the hearts on the glue. Encourage them to put the word side facing up. Once half is filled, repeat the glue step and finish with the remaining hearts.

We talk about patterns often in our house and I was so impressed that Dylan used every color heart and repeated the pattern perfectly along his whole heart! Jake chose to do various patterns throughout based on how many color hearts he had and Emma just made a rainbow of colors. They were all beautiful and they were all so focused throughout the project. And no we didn't eat one single heart because just ask mommy, “Those candies taste gross, they are just for art projects!”

For the final step we wrote the letters "XO" in the middle of our conversation hearts so that they resemble the actual candy we were using and it gave it the extra Valentine's Day touch. You can either do this step for them or I traced the letters and had them use a silver glitter glue pen to trace over it. If you didn't have glitter glue you could use regular glue and then dust some glitter on top or you could just use a marker.