Let’s Celebrate! It’s Valentines Day

It’s our very first ‘CELEBRATIONS’ post. I’m a holiday enthusiast. Gimme all the decorations, fun activities and yummy treats. It’s also fun to sprinkle a few learning opportunities on top too. In all of my “CELEBRATIONS” posts, I’m going to share some ideas that fall under four categories: Something Smart, Something Sweet, Something to Make and Something to Eat.

Let’s get started with our Valentine’s Day edition.

February is here, and what better way to have fun with your littles than to celebrate the month of love together.

Something Smart: Sight Words

We love books at our house, but I’ve noticed that our best, quality, snuggle-up-and-read time is taking place at the end of the day as part of our bedtime routine. I’ve decided that I want to get more intentional about adding reading opportunities throughout the day, in a less unstructured way. In the classroom, many teachers offer students the chance to “read and write around the room” as one of their daily learning activities. It can be implemented in different ways, but often students can use a pointer and read words out loud and see how many they can get, or if they are able to, they can use a clipboard and pencil and copy down the words after they are read to get the added benefit of writing. 

In our case, I knew I wanted to slowly introduce words known as sight words or high-frequency words in our home environment. These are the words that are extremely common in our daily language and are the words that you just immediately see and know, without having to sound them out. Knowing these words can really help early readers get through the first books they will be asked to read independently at school. Some examples of these words are: and, if, are, the, is, it, in, me, my, go, can. You might hear an educator call these “Dolch words” because Dr. Edward William Dolch created a list words that were most popular in children’s books. The words are sorted by level of difficulty from pre-kindergarten to third grade so you can work your way through learning them in a general order. Click here to check out the lists.  

At age three, we are still working on learning the names of letters and the sounds they make, but there’s no reason you can’t add in some words in the mix too! Once a child knows this list of words, reading becomes so much easier since they only have to focus on the remaining words. 

To keep this fun, and in the spirit of the holiday, we just took some foam heart cut-outs (paper is great too) , wrote a few of the easier sight words on them (including our names) and stuck them where we would see them often, in this case along the side of our kitchen island. It didn’t take long to realize they were at baby-reaching level so we moved them to a higher spot later. These act as decorations and keep things festive while injecting a bit of learning too. 

Something Sweet

It’s the mushiest holiday right? Want to spread some warm fuzzies? Try out this simple little positive thinking/gratitude/reflection exercise with your tiny valentine. Think about their closest friends and family members and brainstorm a list of people they will make a valentine for. Then spend a minute thinking about each person and what makes them special Write their positive qualities on their card/valentine (e.g. kind, patient, generous) or mention why you are grateful for them. It’s great for growing a positive mindset and grateful heart and can help build their vocabulary too.   

Something to Make 

How adorable are these little these little guys?!

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You only need some Teddy Graham crackers, conversation heart candies and a bit of icing to stick them together to make it look like Teddy is holding a Valentine. Very cute and easy to add to a snack board (see below).  Also, if you are tight on time it’s a quick no-bake activity that is still very accessible for a wide range of ages. 

Something to Eat

Valentine’s day is notoriously sweet, but if we are being honest we love our sweets on any given day of the year. Our “Something to Eat” for our Valentine’s Day celebration is this snack board inspired by Jenna Rammell (Jenna’s Kitchen on Instagram), who makes and shares fun snack board ideas for each season or holiday of the year. As she explains, just a little bit of a bunch of different things will do the trick. To stick to the theme, I choose sweets (both fruit and treats) that fell into the red and pink colour palette. We are lucky enough to have Bulk Barn here in Canada and it is one of our favourite stores. With rows and rows of bulk food options, you can take as much or as little as you need. They always have a great seasonal section too to help narrow down the choices if you are as indecisive as I am.    

Let me know, what do you have planned to celebrate Valentine’s Day?