We loved celebrating Valentine’s Day this year, and had tons of fun activities for our little love bug to enjoy!

We focused on the letter V, the number 2, a heart shape, and the color pink for these two weeks. To help drive those items from our focus board home and in addition to our books we read (more on those below), we enjoyed dancing and singing along to Story Bots’ The Letter V and The Number 2 videos on YouTube, as well as Pancake Manor’s Pink Song. Grace also enjoyed Sesame Street: Elmo and Abby’s Valentine’s Day Song, the Kidboomer’s Heart Song for Kids and I’m a Little Valentine, as well as Super Simple Songs’ Skidamarink.

Our books for our Valentine’s Theme included I Love You, Baby by Claire Freedman, Disney Book Group’s Minnie Be My Sparkly Valentine, and LOVE from The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper. We have a big Minnie fan on our hands, so of course Grace reached for Be My Sparkly Valentine any chance she had and bonus: it included a whole page of stickers! We love books that double as an activity too! I Love You, Baby is simply precious and pictures various different parent and child animal combinations, and LOVE from The Little Engine That Could is such a simple and sweet little tale about being there for those you love. We read at least one if not all three of these books every day during our Valentine’s theme.

Our first activity for our Valentine’s theme was of course a sensory bin full of all things Valentines, and included heart necklaces, a light up rose, fun heart glasses, a silly headband, a mailbox, balloon, and heart covered scarf. If we don’t already have items around the house to fit our themes, I check out the Dollar Tree for anything that could be useful…I tend to find a lot of good supplies there, and then stuff them all in a gallon size ziplock when we are finished with that theme and place it in our “themes’ storage container for the next time we need it! This little activity bin stayed out the entire time in our living room throughout our Valentine themed weeks for Grace to explore whenever she wanted.

Our second activity was stamping red and pink hearts with recycled paper towel rolls! It was so simple to make the stamps: I just cut the roll in half and bent them on one side to make a heart shape. I set out two different plates of paint (there’s our focus number for our theme), one red and one pink (our focus color) and let Grace stamp away on white cardstock placed on top of some scrap card board to protect our kitchen island’s surface. Super easy and so much fun for Grace and this particular activity not only had our focus number and color but also our shape: the heart!

Once the painting dried, it took the usual art project’s special spot on our fridge for all of us to enjoy through the end of our Valentine’s theme. Grace’s painting made a wonderful addition to our Valentine kitchen décor…don’t you think?

Our next activity was a two part activity! For the first part, Grace worked on those fine motor skills by placing wooden heart stickers (another Dollar Tree find) on some Valentines. I didn’t have any envelopes to spare, so I simply took some cardstock and drew some simple lines to create envelopes, then let Grace place one wooden heart sticker on each one…you know “sealed with love”. Of course I had her point out the pink hearts as that is our color on our focus board for this theme.

For the next part of the activity, I took the mailbox out of the Valentine’s Sensory Bin and placed the letters Grace sealed with hearts and placed them in a basket, and it was time for Grace to mail all her Valentines!

A little bit of real world play and learning about letters being placed in the mailbox engaged Grace enough to want to do this activity for a long time. I love how something so simple can turn into such a fun activity and hold our toddler’s attention for a little longer than usual!

We finally were able to focus on our letter for our Valentine’s theme for our next activity. Grace worked on those early handwriting skills by placing candy hearts along an outline of a V I drew with a sharpie on pink cardstock (hey there’s our color and shape again too). Again super simple but in addition to those early handwriting skills, this activity was also great at working on those fine motor skills and letter recognition. Triple Win!

We finished off our Valentine theme with a sensory bath! A much loved activity we’ve done for several themes in the past! Pink water and lots of other pink items, as well as red, and just for our number of the week…two white hearts. Grace was able to place the foam hearts and letters on the walls of the shower and pour and dump water with pink bowls and cups. The perfect ending to our Valentine’s theme!

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If you’d like to see a sample of how I currently plan out themes for a week check out the Tot School Schedule 🍒 v2.0 page!

You can see a list of our 2020 Tot School Themes 🐝 here.

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You can still see our original Tot School Schedule by visiting the Tot School Schedule 🍍 v1.0 page.

You can also see a list of last year’s themes on the 2019 Tot School Themes ☂️ page.

You can find all our daily songs, their tunes and lyrics by visiting our Tot School Songs 🎵 page.

Want even more resources for Tot School? Check out our Tot School Resources Page 📚 for some of our favorites!

EVERYDAY a little Grace 🌷