Is there anything else besides hearts that is used for Valentines Day crafts with kids?

If there is I've never seen it.

I have a YouTube video on this content as well so if you'd rather watch  video then hop on over by clicking on the image below.

If you'd rather read then read on.

Here are 6 activities using hearts that I show in the video.

This first activity is the simplest of all. All you need to do is cut out a shape of a heart and have the children do any number of process only art activities on top of it. Pains, color, collage, stamp or anything else.

The five year old girl doing this activity used paint sticks to decorate her heart. I then showed her that it would look good framed onto a black paper. Instead of accepting that as I lay the heart down on the black paper she started tracing around her colored heart thereby making another heart picture.

The second activity is creating a mirror image heart. You will need to cut out the hearts by drawing it as shown below.

This will ensure that the heart is symmetrical.

You then fold the heart in half and the children are instructed to paint only on one side. While the paint is still wet they fold over the heart onto the paint getting a symmetrical image.

Pasting this onto another paper for a frame will enhance it.

Activity three is a heart collage.

I cut out hearts in many sizes and materials for them to collage with. Discuss with them the options such as overlapping and borders and you can add scissors as well if they want to cut them.

The children doing this activity were one five year old and two seven year olds. The five year old ended up using some of the negative space pieces that I had lying around that I had cut the hearts out of.

For activities four and five i used homemade stencils that I cut out of construction paper. Cardstock is probably a better choice.

For the first stencil activity I demonstrated how to color or paint inside the various size stencils.

For the second stencil activity I gave white oil pastels to color inside the stencils as many times as they wanted to on the page. Then I showed them how to use watercolors over the oil pastel. This is a resist activity and using white allows the white shape to magically appear when painting over with watercolors..

With this last heart activity you start out with a small heart in the middle of the paper. You can either draw it free hand or use a stencil. Then the children can keep repeating the heart shape over and over with different mediums.

If they want to use only one but just different colors than that could work too.

So that's a wrap for my Valentines Day heart crafts.