Lollipop Flower Valentines

We are having an upcoming Valentine's Day card exchange at our weekly music class. Most of the class members are girls, so we tried making some lollipop flower valentines today to see if we liked them enough to give out to friends.

Materials: pink or red paper, crayons, tape, lollipop, hole puncher, tape, pencil, green pipe cleaner

Directions:

1. Draw hearts on your pink or red paper and then have your child color them. (I folded the paper in half, drew heart halves and then after my son finished coloring, I cut out the entire heart)

2. Cut out the hearts. My little guy was fascinated by how you could open and close the heart halves, so that kept him entertained while I did the cutting.

3. Stack the hearts together and then hole punch them all at one time so that the hole is in the same place on each heart.

4. Layer the hearts on top of one another to make a flower. Use tape (I used double-sided tape) to secure the hearts to one another.

5. Stick the lollipop through the holes in the flower petals. You can use tape to help secure the lollipop. At this point I would give my child a lollipop to suck on after all that hard work 🙂

6. To secure the lollipop further and add some color, you can wrap a green pipe cleaner around the handle of the lollipop.

7. Write the friend's name on one of the flower petals and the lollipop valentine is ready to go!

We got this idea from Martha Stewart and tweaked it a little bit. We probably wouldn't make these for all 20 of our closest friends, but maybe 4 or 5 of them. NoTimeForFlashcards has another fun version of this project, but you make a cool candy bouquet. The perfect centerpiece for a toddler V-day party.

Language Development:

This is a great activity to foster a conversation with your child about friends. You can ask your child who her friends are and talk about her friends with her. If you have pictures of her friends, you can point them out and talk about how you are making a present for "Claire" or "Dylan" for Valentine's Day. You can say nice things about your child's friend or if you have an older child, have your child try and tell you some reasons why they like that specific friend.