Children’s literature is a good resource for finding Valentines ideas. Stories such as Little Bear’s Friend by Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak, show children that love is demonstrated by small acts of kindness.
The Little Bear series are simple stories that are playful, warm and suitable for children, ages 4 to 8 years old. Love can be a vague word and children (and adults!!) need more concrete examples of what it means.
Talk about how Little Bear showed kindness in the stories and how we can show kindness to our friends and family with the words we say, the expressions on our faces and actions we take.
Acts of kindness ideas for kids…
- Smile at the other children
- Say hi
- Share some toys
- Help someone if they get hurt
- Help someone who is having a difficult time with an activity
- Invite a classmate who is alone to play with your group
- Say you are sorry if you need to
Begin with a story starter … Love is …
- After the activities above, and depending on the children’s abilities, have them write a few letters and words and/or have a buddy or adult record the children’s acts of kindness Valentines ideas
- Use pink paper and give students trays of crayons without black, dark blue and browns for a warm color scheme.
- Scroll down for Little Bear book suggestions.
More Valentines Ideas – ABC Puzzles
I love ideas where the children make items they can play with later. These easy to make heart puzzles are fun for the children to make and share with their friends.
Materials:
- old educational supply catalogues
- 4 inch heart tracers or precut hearts
- scissors
- glue
Procedure:
- Collect old educational supply catalogues and tear out a pile of pages featuring toys, dolls, puppets and books.
- Have children:
- trace and cut out a heart
- cut out and glue a picture of a toy or book and glue it on one side of the heart
- use the catalogue pages to find and cut out the letter that the toy or book begins with
- cut the heart in half in a zigzag fashion (demonstrate how cutting too many zigs or zags can make the puzzle cards difficult to put together)
- mix up their hearts with other children’s hearts and solve the puzzles
- Have the child print the correct letter on the back of the heart piece with the picture on it, to make the puzzles self correcting.
- For more on cutting skills, read…
Little Bear Books and puppets
Children can imagine themselves as “little bears” and enjoy adding their own creativity to the stories. Provide odds and ends of materials and a few sample cut out Little Bear type puppets and your students will follow your lead.
Let students take turns with their puppets, sharing how they were kind to another bear. Maurice Sendak’s pen and ink illustrations are heart warming and display the bears’ emotions so well.
The four stories are: Little Bear and Emily, about the friends’ meeting; Duck, Baby Sitter; The Party at Owl’s House, in which Lucy falls from a tree; and “Your Friend, Little Bear”, about Little Bear’s coping when Emily goes away for the school year.
Little Bear Audio CD Collection
