Valentine Card Mailboxes

Every year, I ask each family to work together to create a "mailbox" to hold all their Valentine cards. Our families are really creative and have a great time working together. The kids can't wait to bring them and share with the class how they made them!

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Our Valentine's Day Fun 2011

Our Valentine's Day activities have been ongoing for about a week now. We managed to get more than our moneys worth using conversation hearts in various activities. We decorated hearts and used them to decorate a Valentine Tree for our door.

We have patterned, sorted, counted and played math games with conversation heart erasers.

Each child brought in a tissue box to wrap, decorate and use as a Valentine holder. We wrapped them in bulletin board paper, which was great fine motor practice.

Let the creative juices flow!

Leave it to the teacher to forget to bring a box for herself until the very last minute! I missed the sticker frenzy by waiting so long and most of the stickers were gone, so I decided to add a little paint to tie mine into our postal theme.

I have several students still struggling with writing their own name. I thought it would be good practice for the kids to write their own name on their Valentine cards. We didn't address the cards to a recipient, which made for much easier delivery.

For our gifts to the parents, we made refrigerator magnet art, using Crayola Model Magic. We cut shapes with cookie cutters and let them dry for a few days.

We painted them with watercolor paints and glued magnets to the back.

We dipped our cookie cutters in pinks, reds and blues to decorate bags to wrap them in.

During nap, I ran out to pick up a few last minute party items. To occupy a few of our non-sleepers, my assistant allowed them to put some finishing touches on their gift bags. Apparently, after finishing the wrapping, they decided Ms. Tiffany needed a new hairdo for the party! (She's such a good sport, she even made sure everyone who wanted a turn had a little portion of hair to "fix"! :)

Much to our surprise, one of our dads belongs to a barbershop quartet. He and his group surprised us with a serenade. It happened so fast that by the time I realized what was happening, got the camera and got the video mode switched on, the song was almost over, but I'll include the clip here to show how good they were!

For Valentine party snacks, we had a frosted cookie and a few Cheetos Puffs, but had requested mostly healthy items, so we snacked well, but healthily.

My friend, Mia and her snack: "Look, Mrs. Ayn, I made a happy plate!"

Hope your Valentine's Day was as happy as ours! :)

Postcards From Around The World

Recently, we participated in a postcard exchange. We sent and received postcards from all over the U.S. and even got one from Australia! We wrote our postcard as a group during circle time one morning and pasted it on the back of a picture of our class.

Our note to others:

    Dear Friends,

We are in Pre-K. We live in Georgia. We have 20 kids in our class. We have lots of fun and learn many new things in school. Hope you have a great year!

Mrs. Ayn’s Pre-K Class 

And the picture:

  
Each week, we sent several cards out. This was such a great experience for all of us. In this instant age of email, kids don't "get" the importance of the postal system.  We tracked on our map where each card came from and the distance it traveled: a short trip, a long trip or a REALLY long trip! We couldn't resist having my assistant send a postcard from Plymouth Rock when she when home to Boston for Thanksgiving!

Create your own photo slideshow

I'd really like to thank Deborah Stewart at Teach Preschool for co-ordinating this. It was such a rewarding experience. I hope we'll be able to get a group together to do it again next year!

Valentine's Day Fun!

Here are a few of the things we did to celebrate Valentine's day.

I had the kids each bring in an empty cereal box. We covered them in bulletin board paper, provided a wide array of adornments, and let the kids create! They really did a great job!


We wanted to make these stained glass tealights as parent gifts for Christmas, but we had a few parents bring in ornament crafts unexpectedly, so we put these off. It was good fine motor practice. The friends had to put glue on baby food jars, then covered with tissue. We added a coat of glue at the end to secure loose ends and provide a "finish". They are very pretty when lit. I think the parents will love these! An additional activity was to wrap them for the parents. We also added cards we made earlier in the week.



For our lobby display, we made "love bugs" out of pre-cut hearts. I am so proud of my little guys---they were so creative, even coming up with bug names for their creations!



We read the fun book, The Day It Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond.



We made our own version of the Valentine Tree for our classroom door to display some of the beautiful hearts the friends have made in our art center this week. Thanks to miller moments for the inspiration...I thought I knew all the Felicia Bond books! We also read a variety of books about Valentine's Day, the post office and writing letters.



Some of our table activities included a match/memory game with Valentine cards, heart themed size seriation, and a hearts matching game with uppercase/lowercase letter on each half of the heart. We used themed erasers, pom poms and ice trays for a variety of math games and fine motor practice.

Our heart letter matching game

A twist on a matching game the friends made up. Match the shape behind your back. No peeking!

Our pom poms and ice trays for patterning, counting, dice game and fine motor practice.

This month, we also added a post office to our dramatic play area. We had a cash register, phone, keyboard, postcards, stamps and stamp pads. I used a pocket chart to make "mailboxes" for the students to deliver notes and mail to classmates. I'm proud that my center was an improvement over last year, after visiting Getting Messy with Ms. Jessi and seeing some of the great things she was doing in her post office center!

Our little post office in dramatic play.

Stamping mail

Sorting mail and delivering it. Each student has a mail slot in the pocket chart. There is even a slot for my assistant and myself!


We have had a lot of fun, but it has been hard work for both the adults and the kids in my class! I am looking forward to our upcoming winter break/furlough days!