Valentines

Our most recent project was putting together Valentines for the girls to give to the other kids at daycare. We walked into Michael's looking for ideas, and of course they had everything under the sun. I looked at a make-your-own Valentines kit, complete with ribbon, doilies, etc, but I couldn't really see two toddlers replicating the cute Valentines displayed on the back of the box. Instead we picked up a small pack of assorted Valentines stickers and headed home. Since Rebecca was born I have slowly amassed a fair selection of paint, stamps, markers and colored construction paper at home, so I figured I'd add some heart-shaped stickers, put them all together, and end up with a fine a multimedia valentine project.

My approach to introducing children to art tends to be more experimental than instructional. This may be partly because my kids are so young, but it's also because I think it's important for them to get to know the materials in their own way before labeling certain uses as correct and incorrect. Rather than have finished products that all resemble one another almost exactly, art is a subject where a child's own personality can dictate the final masterpiece.

That having been said, can you tell which Valentines were done by a three-year-old and which were done by a one-year-old? I will make a disclaimer that I had to interfere with Elliot's creative process a bit because she refused to leave the stickers that she placed on the hearts there for more than a minute at a time, and determined as I was to have something for her to give her friends on Valentine's Day, I had to remove the hearts from the table before she could take everything off of them. While she didn't quite understand the ink-stamp process, she did have lots of fun with the paint, not to mention the crumpling. Lots of crumpling. Luckily a heavy book was able to help with that. Rebecca filled her hearts with lots of stamps, stickers and paint, though she did seem to want to match the red stickers with the red hearts instead of letting them contrast. Next it's time to glue the hearts onto a supportive backing and attach something sweet. Happy Valentine's Day!