Car Lover’s Valentine

My little guy loves cars, so I thought these valentines from Family Fun would be right up his alley.

Materials Needed: painter's tarp or newspaper to cover table, paint, 1-2 plastic cars (we used old ones he doesn't like too much), paper plate for paint, cardstock, scissors (we used paper cutter), chocolate cars (or materials to make a candy race car), pen, and double-sided tape (or a glue gun).

Directions:
1. Cover your table and pour the paint onto a paper plate.

2. Show your child how to drive the car through the paint and then drive the car onto the paper to make tire marks.

3. Blot the paint on another scrap piece of paper if it is too goopy.

4. Let the paint dry.

5. Cut the pages into smaller pieces (I made mine approx 4x6) once they are dry.

6. Assemble candy cars (I used heart shaped Hershey's candies for the bumper, Hershey's miniatures for the spoilers, Nerds for the base, and mints for the wheels). I stuck everything together with double-sided tape. It isn't as sturdy as using a glue gun, but all the cars survived.

7. Tape the candy cars to the tire covered paper and write a cute message. Some ideas can be found here.

Our friends loved these and my son yells "car treats" whenever he sees Hershey's miniatures now. My son thought painting with cars was the coolest thing. We will be embedding that into another art project soon! I will admit, this was less of a toddler craft than I usually post. He was only able to do about 1/3 of the project. Originally I planned to just buy candy cars to stick to his cards, but I couldn't find any cheap ones anywhere. The cars we assembled were definitely a "parent assembly" project, although older kids could probably do them by themselves.

Language Development:

This project lent itself to talking a lot about cars! The older the kid, the more in detail you can go about the parts of a car. We mostly just talked about wheels, bumpers, tires, and tire tracks. We also talked about the different ways we could move our cars through the paint and on the paper- bumpy, fast, slow, zig zag, diagonal (hard word!), straight, etc.