Valentine Bags and Heart Links

I wanted to quickly show you the bags we made to hold our valentines. We started it last week during our dental health unit. I traced hearts onto white paper and put out red, pink and purple paint. The kids dipped toothbrushes into the paint and flicked the bristles to make the paint splatter onto their heart.

This didn't work as well as I thought it would. I tried adding water, but that just made it drip big globs of paint. Maybe our brushes were too old or something. We had one brush that worked great, but the others were very hard to work with. But the kids enjoyed it, so that's all that matters. When they were dry I cut them out and wrote their names on them. Then I taped them onto bags that I bought at Party City.

And then, to decorate it even more, we used some foam stickers that I got from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

 The kids loved the glitter ones.

 We pretended those purses were padlocks, keeping our valentines safe!

Here is the valentine I made for my kids:

I wanted it to be something they could read themselves, so I used a wiggle eye, a heart gem and used glitter glue to make the U. I attached it to a kaleidoscope that I found at Party City.
Another thing I wanted to share with you are these heart links I found at Target. They were in the valentine section, not the dollar spot. They were $3 and had 60 in a pack. We've been using them all week, to make patterns,

practice counting (using a die to tell us how many links to add to the chain),

sort them by color using what I like to call "robotic claws,"

and play tic-tac-toe. My kids are really into this game lately.

We haven't had any break yet, so I'm pretty happy with them. And they really are pretty, too!
Happy Valentine's Day!