After-Valentine Bulletin Board

I had been wondering what to do with the bulletin board outside the workroom after Valentine's Day. A coworker suggested Where's Waldo, which I thought was a great idea, especially because I wanted to keep the red background and white border. I went searching and found an awesome silhouette character idea at A Rainbow of Teaching.  She made silhouettes of various children's book characters on a red background. I decided to do something similar, and this is the result!

   

Skippyjon Jones, Clifford the Big Red Dog, The Lorax

Where's Waldo?, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Cat in the Hat, the protagonist from The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

I saw this bulletin board after I'd already made the one above, but I'm still so glad I found it. The silhouettes are amazing, I especially love the Clifford silhouette. 

Valentine Books & Eeyore

I saw these adorable Valentine Chocolate Books at Target. I wish they had had a version with book titles on the spines. These are some of the cutest Valentine treats I've seen.

And just for fun, this beautiful Eeyore mug gift.

Animal Valentines

A really cute Valentine craft we had this year:

An elephant, a cat, a fish, and a dog.

This great idea was from Sassy Dealz. I thought the elephant would be the most popular, but the dog turned out to be the most popular.

Two Great Books for St. Valentine's Day

If you're looking for some books for St. Valentine's Day, look no further. These two books have beautiful stories with breathtaking artwork, and would complement each other wonderfully.

Henry in Love by Peter McCarty

Snowy Valentine by David Petersen

Valentine's Day Ideas

One of the ideas I have always had for Valentine's Day is the creation of a Valentine Mailbox utilizing either a shoe box or a Kleenex box (especially as Kleenex boxes already have built-in slits for Valentine cards to go through). The book Queen of Hearts by Mary Engelbreit gave me some of the ideas for the Valentine mailbox. If you haven't read it, please do! It's one of the best Valentine picture books I've come across, and it introduced me to Mary Engelbreit. I have now fallen in love with her dog and Scottie illustrations.

Ask for donations of Kleenex boxes early to make sure you have a good amount for the number of children you expect at your St. Valentine's Day event. You can cover the boxes with construction paper beforehand, or allow the children to cover them on their own. Use die cuts to create shapes such as hearts, castles, fairies, dragons, and other Valentine-related shapes. These can be used to decorate the box. The children can then use the box as a mailbox for all of their Valentine cards.

I have not yet managed to collect the 30 boxes I was hoping to have by Valentine's Day, so I came up with a quick and easy craft that children could do if there were not enough boxes. As it turns out, I love this craft just as much, and I'm not sure which of the two is my favorite. This craft consists of cutting the top of a brown paper bag about an inch or so, and decorating it with a Cat, Dog, or Giraffe template and heart. I found this adorable idea over at Craft of the Day, a daily craft blog from the makers of The Best Kids Book Site. There is also a very cute Panda Bear template you can use as well.

You can also check out this adorable Dog Box for Valentine Cards from DLTK.

And finally, this last craft was originally from Family Fun (by Disney, which is now Spoonful, I believe). You take the Conversation Hearts by Brachs or Sweethearts (there are also some small Valentine tattoos at the stores that would work), and you cover them with construction paper and an iPod template to create the illusion that it is an iPod. You can pretty much use any candy, however. There was a box of 30 Twizzlers and Jolly Ranchers (15 of each) that was much cheaper than buying conversation hearts, and that is what I decided to use. The candies were covered with construction paper and tape, and the iPod template was glued on the front. The adorable iPod template was incredibly hard to find, especially with the moving around on the Family Fun crafts site to the Spoonful site, but I was able to find it. I can't find the exact link I used, but I did find it available for download on this site. The iPod (or iLove) shows Valentine songs, but you can edit the template to add your own songs. For this craft, I added the following book titles: Bunnicula, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter. 

You can see Reese's candy because you can add two strings to the iLove and attach one Reese's peanut butter cup (small) to each string to create headphones! Very cute indeed.

You can visit these websites to see how others have created Valentine iPods.

U Create Crafts

Y2K Mom

MeckMom

Mom's Crafty Space

Picture Book of the Month: Love, Splat

This is actually the Picture Book of the Month for February, but I am a little late in posting.

For the month of February, I was planning to select picture books related to Valentine's Day to read during story hours. While searching the catalog I came across Love, Splat by Rob Scotton, and found that this was one of several books about a cat named Splat. Something about the book made me feel that it would be perfect; when I was able to look through it I found it to be both wonderfully written and illustrated. The details in the illustrations are lovely, and one of the really nice things about the book is that the illustrations and the white background and the words all go really well together.

One of the things I have found is that children are very attentive to details. They will catch things that adults don't, and they really appreciate those details. With this book, the children would most often comment on little details such as Splat sitting on his bench with Kitten, and especially how their tails curl together to make a heart on the back of the book. They also note that Spike is very mean to Splat and sympathise with Splat for the way Spike treats him. Overall, this is a very good book to read and will be enjoyable for all age groups.