Love Weeks 1 & 2

Rather than doing two separate posts for our first two weeks of LOVE, I thought I might make it easier on myself and combine them in one "quick" post, haha. We'll see. I just love the month of February, not so much because of Valentine's Day itself, but because it's an excuse to surround ourselves with all things "lovey." I'm going to try to keep my descriptions short and sweet so I will go ahead and say I got most of these ideas and resources from the following websites/blogs:

Making Learning Fun Valentine Theme page
ABCteach Valentine's Theme page
Totally Tots (LOVE Bible Bites themes)
No Time for Flash Cards
...and of course thought of a few on my own :) I think.

Conversation Heart Color Sort:
When Little Bear found the many boxes of conversations hearts I had stored away in the closet, she just couldn't wait to get her hands on them! So this was our first activity to kick off Love Week 1. I labeled 4 baby food jars with the 4 colors and she dumped the hearts out and began sorting. After she had them all sorted by color, we looked at the jars and I asked her which one she thought had the most, least, and if she thought any of them had the same number. We counted each color and discovered that PINK had the most, which was truly exciting for her since she adores pink and purple. She then was of course allowed to eat a few and funny, she chose to only eat pink and purple ones ;)

Marshmallow Heart:
Every single time we go to the grocery and the girls are with me, Little Bear mentions the "fun colored marshmallows" when we're in that particular isle. So I just had to grab a bag the last time we went and we used them for this fun little craft/activity. I cannot tell you how excited she was to do this! And Tiny patiently sat in her seat and ate marshmallows while watching big sister :) I drew a heart with glue on the paper and LB had to carefully place the marshmallows along the glue (and eat a few when she needed a break). This was a GREAT fine motor activity and now we have this adorable "marshmallow heart art" hanging on our door :)

Clothespin Counting Hearts:
I found this adorable activity at Makinglearningfun.com and since the "real" conversations hearts were such a hit, I thought she might go for fake ones on paper ;) I only printed numbers 0-13 because I didn't think she'd have the patience to count the higher teen numbers up to 20...maybe next year. After counting how many hearts were on each card, she had to clip a clothespin on the corresponding number. Fun, but the attention span wasn't lasting long that morning and we had a little "clothespin thief" who kept undoing every card she completed! Oh well!

ABC Heart File Folder Game:
Oh yes, this came from filefoldergames.com and I actually made it a very long time ago. But since we rarely pull out the file folder games, I thought this would be a great opportunity to have a little review of letters. She matched the lower case letters to the capital ones on the folder and of course I had to "spice it up" a bit to keep her attention. It's always more fun when Mommy acts silly anyway, right?

Valentine Heart Cookies:
One evening last week we decided to mix up some sugar cookie dough and decorate some heart cookies. I think Little Bear's favorite cookie cutter to use is the heart shape so she had a blast with this! Both girls helped me make the dough earlier in the day (which was quite interesting with no Daddy there to help watch busy little Tiny). We let the dough sit in the fridge until that evening and then began cutting out the hearts and baking. Little Bear absolutely loves to decorate cookies so she was in heaven spreading the pink icing and putting on red sprinkles :)

Homemade Valentines:
I saw this idea on the No Time for Flash Cards blog and knew we just had to do it. My mom found a tiny heart cookie cutter and Daddy picked up some red glitter at the store for us and we were all set. I had pre-cut all the "pieces" to assemble each Valentine card the night before and Little Bear glued them together. She then dipped the cookie cutter in the glue and "stamped" it on the paper several times......

Then.....you guessed it....sprinkled on the red glitter until her little heart was content :) When we lifted up the paper and the extra glitter fell off, we had beautiful red glitter heart shapes. I am sad to say I didn't get a picture of the final product, but they turned out simply adorable and we will most certainly be doing this again. I must warn, it made a HUGE mess EVERYWHERE, but I'm happy to report that glitter cleans up nicely with a vacuum cleaner :)

I love......Writing Activity:
I made this little paper for Little Bear to write about the people and things she loves. After reading the Bible verse at the top and having a short discussion, she dictated what she wanted me to write on the lines. SO.CUTE. I am happy to say that she didn't name any "things," only people. I had to chuckle when she mentioned our neighbor, Dash, because she is absolutely obsessed with him! She's only met him a handful of times, but she always talks about him and his whole family. I said, "are you sure you love him and don't just like him?" and she replied, "no, I love Dash Mommy." Okay then. She drew a picture to go with the writing and used ONLY gray....(I mean really, here's a girl who LOVES pink and purple and the chances I've given her with all these "LOVE" activities to use those colors, she chooses GRAY...go figure).

Same/Different Heart Shapes Worksheet:
This was a short, but fun little paper that I knew Little Bear would get a kick out of. And she did. She got to use a red ink pen to circle the heart that was different in each row. After she found the one that was different, I had her explain why it was different. Fun, fun! (and I'll note that she did NOT want her face to be in the picture on this one...probably fear of the flash again!)

Heart Colors Book:
I can't even begin to remember where this book came from (maybe MLF?), but it was cute, short and focused on colors so I printed it. We went through each page together and found the color word and she colored all the hearts on that page that particular color. She's not very interested in coloring these days, so I had to jump in and "take turns" with her to get this done. She was more interested in drawing circles around the hearts, which was fine with me too :)

Heart Numbers:
I laminated these little hearts and put a little sticky magnet on the back of each one so we could play this game on the door or fridge, rather than on the floor. After gathering all of them up (they had been "stolen" by a certain little person in our house), Little Bear used her counting skills to place them in the correct order. She had a little issue with 11 and 12, but got it with a little help.

Heart Music Shaker:
Goodness...can't recall where I saw this idea either...someone's cool blog, that's all I know. Anywho, LB colored the bottoms of two paper plates (with much help), then I traced and cut out the heart shapes in both plates. I cut apart a ziploc bag and used double sided tape to adhere it to the top side of each plate to create a "window." We added several red, pink, and purple puff balls and about 5 little jingle bells and I stapled it shut. Viola (sorry I don't know how to make that little mark the French use)...a Valentine's Day shaker!

Love Bible Bites:
Okay, I'm getting tired of thinking and typing and I'm sad because this is probably my favorite part of the past two weeks...I'll do my best! We started off Love Week 1 reading 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a together each night and have continued into this week. After Daddy reads the verse (and Little Bear repeats each part after him), she gets to choose a heart out of the envelope. We then talk about what it says and she tapes it to our LOVE poster. We have had a lot of fun with this, although sometimes we do it at a time when her attention span is so totally gone. Here is our poster so far, I think we have one more heart in the envelope to do tonight.

Love Week 2 Bible Bites:
This second week, we have added another verse but did not find an appropriate version of it to actually read with the girls. So we have been focusing on the importance of marriage. We've had discussions about people we know who are married and what it means to be married. We've looked through Mommy and Daddy's wedding album (which is something LB just LOVES to do!!!). We played our first dance song Love of My Life by Michael W. Smith and we all danced together in the living room......my little Tiny lovebug just LOVES to dance and cuddle so this was especially fun for her :) And we have big plans to watch our wedding video later this evening! What fun on Valentine's weekend....

Here are a few non-LOVE pictures I snapped this week:

Baby girl drawing intently:

They had to play with puff balls after we made the Heart Shaker:

Melissa & Doug word puzzle play time (Tiny liked to throw the letters):

A new favorite we just dug out of the closet, she LOVES this pig and is so good at it!

Ahem.....well, I wondered why Tiny was so content just watching all the glitter commotion on the day we made Valentines.....and this is what she was doing all the while: (better than on the wall!)

Mama's Favorite:
The girls were watching a DVD one day and I kept removing Tiny from Little Bear's head (she tends to be a bit pushy about where she wants to sit)...but later found that all she really wanted to do was play with Sissy's hair. And Sis was letting her! SO.STINKIN.SWEET!

I hope everyone has a fabulous Valentine's Day, spending it with those you love (whether grown ups or little ankle biters!). We are going to have a special family Valentine's dinner at home "Fancy Nancy" style and I can hardly wait!