Our top 5 Valentines Day Twinkl activities for pre-schoolers…

This Valentines Day I will be spending the day by myself enjoying peace and quiet (whilst doing the usual housework and eating cake). So we are celebrating this weekend whilst J and Daddy are both home with me. I’m generally a busy parent (I rarely sit my backside down for long, and evenings I’m far too braindead and tired to be productive) so any time I can find ready made activities and things to print then I am all over it. This is where my Twinkl subscription has come in handy. They have 100’s of resources all ready and waiting to be downloaded.

So today I will share with you my top 5 which J, Daddy and I have chosen:

1. Valentines Day Sensory Bag

J is very oversensitive to textures which are squishy or wet. I’m trying to desensitise him so he will be more open to touching things and one day this might encourage him to try different texture food. This sensory bag activity seemed like it would be great. Its in a bag so although J will feel the squashy texture he wont get it on his hand or feel the wetness. The fact its Valentines Day themed is just to get us into the celebratory mood. I’m hoping to do this in the next couple of days and talk about the shapes of the hearts, the colours, who we love etc.

2. Valentine’s Day Heart Mobile

I love arts and craft, despite not being particulary creative myself. J however, is not such a fan. Give him stickers and he’s a happy bunny. I thought that this activity was quite basic and quick so J doesn’t have to be there for too long. Even a short activity will boost his interest and his self esteem as he gets praised for his efforts. I want to use this to decorate the kitchen for our valentines dinner together as a family. We only get to eat as a three twice a week so its lovely to be able to make it special.

3.Valentine’s Day Dominoes

J loves board games. He’s very quick at problem solving and recognising visuals such as numerals. At the moment I’m encouraging J to learn what numbers mean. That the numerals mean an amount. This concept can be quite hard for children. They often learn to count almost like a poem ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ but as them to get 3 pencils, or 2 apples and they will usually come back with a handful. Dominoes is a great matching game where we can talk about how many hearts are in each set. We talked about more or fewer and same.

4. Valentines Day ‘patterns’ colouring in

This is another maths activity as well as supporting J’s concentration and control. The aim is to talk about the different patterns on the colour in sheets, and start to control his movements to colour in the hearts rather than the random scribbles all over. We talked about colours (and used the pecs cards to encourage sentence building) and made some pretty pictures to give to people J loves (J only made one picture before wanting to leave and has decided it’s for Grandma and Grandad).

5. Valentines Day tweezer game

I’m combined valentines day and star wars for this activity. As you may have read in previous blogs J is a huge star wars fan. So one of the best ways to get him involved in an activity is to make it star wars related. The aim for this activity is to collect the hearts using the tweezers based on how many are on the Star Wars themed numeral cards. We took turns at choosing a card and picking up the hearts. This helps with fine manipulative skills (the physical skills needed for pencil control in the future) and also maths concepts (collecting the right amount of hearts). J is very competitive and was eager to be the ‘winner’.

None of these will be forced on J. The more you try and ‘make’ a child do something, the more they will dig their heels in, or simply have a negative memory of it. The games may take a long time and be started and stopped multiple times. I’ll use J’s ‘now and next’ board to encourage him to complete activities but I mainly want him to have fun. I want him to know he is loved and that I simply want to spend time with him. That’s what valentines day means in our household (ps: if Daddy is reading this, for us it means buying your wife chocolate, cake and flowers…just in case you get confused haha).

I hope everyone has a lovely Valentines Day with the people you love. Let me know your plans at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram.

Disclaimer: I am a Twinkl blogger and have been given a subscripted in return for blog posts sharing out adventures. All opinions and writing are my own.