Valentine's Day is a favorite day in kindergarten for many reasons! The students love to share with their friends, the bright colors are welcomed after a cold and gray January, and creativity is in full bloom. Hearts, doilies and stickers add fun to the process as well. A few days before the special occasion, the students decorated bags to collect and keep safe the Valentine's cards they would receive from their friends. The children used fine motor and literacy skills to cut, glue, trace and write as they created individual bags.
Then the kindergartners were eager to share the love beyond our classroom walls and created very special Valentine cards for their families. They artists worked carefully to design a card that would express their love with hearts and other "love" drawings. Inside, each child wrote messages to their loved ones. It was amazing to see our kindergarten writers taking their time to print the letters with care so that their audience could read their words of love. Some friends were eager to create more than one card for loved ones!
At home, the students had been practicing writing their classmates names and signing their own names on cards as well. After several days of preparing for the day, it was finally Valentine's Day. At school, the growing kindergarten literacy skills were a joy to see as each child had the opportunity to read the names that were on the cards they were delivering!
Love and friendship filled the air as the children shared cards and treats with one another. Pride in their hard work was evident as smiles reached from ear to ear and exclamations of "this is mine!" and "look what I did!" could be heard during Valentine delivering!
Kindergartners love to write and create, and Valentine's Day was a perfect opportunity for them to share their growing skills. Providing real and authentic writing experiences for the students makes it fun and engaging as they practice fine motor and literacy skills. It might be fun to have a box at home with envelopes, a variety of paper, and writing tools so that your child can continue to write notes to loves ones, make birthday cards, or celebrate other special occasions in your child's life and their loved ones. Don't be surprised if they want to begin mailing items at your local post office as we begin to share and mail kindergarten notes to others in the lower school through the first grade post office project!
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