The Best Valentine’s Day Activities for Guaranteed Fun

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and I know it can be a surprisingly stressful time for parents. I don’t know about you, but I often feel as though I’m scrambling at the last minute. There’s always trying to get Valentine’s Day cards together for my kids’ classes and generally trying to figure out fun things to do. I always have a desire to make the day feel special, but often forget to plan ahead.

If this sounds like you, no worries because I have you covered! In this post, I’ll give you some easy Valentine’s Day ideas that will be fun, but low stress if you’re scrambling. I’ll cover:

• Valentine’s Day Activities for Toddlers
• Valentine’s Day Activities for Non-Toddler Kids
• STEM Activities
• Games to Play

If you are in need of last minute Valentine’s Day card ideas, check out my post: Amazing Last Minute Valentine’s Day Card Ideas.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. When you click these links, I may get a small commission. It won’t cost you anything, but it helps me to run this site. I only promote products and services that I think are great. Having been an educator for over a decade and a parent myself, I use my experience to judge whether a product is worthy. So, you can be assured that I always have your best interests at heart.

So let’s get started!

Valentine’s Day Activities for Toddlers

Hole Punch Fine Motor Development

First up, grab some heart shaped hole punches and let your toddler go to town on some construction paper! Once they’re done, you can turn it into some cute craft ideas for your older kids (or yourself). Of course, I’ve got you covered here in the below section “Valentine’s Day Activities for Non-Toddler Kids.”

Valentine’s Day Sensory Bin

If you’ve read my other blog posts (see Leafy Adventures, Arctic Animals, and Snow Day Activities), you know I love a good sensory bin! Thus, I had to create a sensory bin for Valentine’s Day. Therefore, I used an empty chocolate box, dry white lima beans and some pompoms and mini erasers I had lying around for this sensory bin. In order to develop fine motor, I included tweezers for her to pinch. I also always include containers for pouring and scooping.

Valentine’s Day Activities for Non-Toddler Kids

Canvas Heart Paintings

Here is a cute heart painting on canvas from Feeling Nifty. It’s so easy even your toddlers can do it! Of course you’ll need a couple of canvases, contact paper, and paint. You cut your contact paper to the size of your canvas, then cut out a heart. You can then use both parts of the contact paper to make the two different styles of painting like we did. We used the credit card method mentioned in the link, as well as the Q-tip method.

Educational Tip: Use this craft to talk to your kids about the art concepts of positive and negative space. Positive space refers to the subject of the artwork. In this case, it’s the heart is the positive space in both paintings. On the other hand, negative space refers to the space around the subject. For example, in the Q-tip painting the negative space is colored in.

Crafts Using Hole Punched Hearts

Need something to do with all of those hearts your toddler (or older kid) punched out from before? Check out this cute little artwork idea. I’ve even included a free printable so all your kids have to do is glue on the hearts.

STEM Activities

Heart Cup Tower Challenge

This was so much fun to do as a family, and so simple! The first step is to grab some red plastic cups. Then, cut some strips of cardboard from a box you have lying around (thank you Amazon!). Finally, challenge your family to build a heart by stacking the cups.

Educational Tip: Incorporate science by having your kid make a hypothesis about what they think would happen, test it, then analyze what happened and why. Then repeat this for each successive try! Doing so will help them engage in the scientific process and be really strategic about what they’re doing.

Valentine’s Day Coding

The next idea is a simple coding activity to do with kids from Little Bins Little Hands. For my toddler, even though she’s too young to understand coding, stringing the pony beads onto a pipe cleaner is a great fine motor activity. In addition to being a great craft, it teaches kids the basics of binary coding and lets them have some fun with it. I recently bought this craft kit, which has pipe cleaners and pony beads for this (and many of my other activities).

Educational Tip: Since a computer doesn’t read letters like we do, we need a different language to talk to them. Instead, it reads a letter in a series of 1’s and 0’s. Therefore, each letter has its own code of 1’s and 0’s. This code is called the ASCII Binary Alphabet.

Balancing Hearts

Check out this super cool balancing hearts activity from Red Ted Art. All you need is cardboard, bamboo skewers, clay, and card stock paper. We didn’t have clay, so I used some play dough we have at home. If you need a simple at-home play dough recipe, of course I have you covered: check out my Arctic Animals post.

Educational Tip: In addition to the heart cup tower activity, have your kid make hypothesis about what they need to do to get it to balance and test it out.

Games to Play

Matching Games

Matching games are easy and fun to make. Additionally, most age levels love them. Consequently, matching is part of sorting and noticing patterns in the world. For example, my 2-year old has started exploring these concepts with lining things up. Therefore, a matching game is a great next step for her. Conversely, matching games can be a good way to build older kids’ memory and recall skills.

I have provided two options for this. For one, you can print off these cards from Crazy Little Projects. Another idea is to put dot stickers on the bottom of chocolate kisses like in this idea from Creations by Kara.

Minute to Win It Games

Finally, I strongly suggest playing some Minute to Win It gamesI used to always do Minute to Win It games with my students the last week of school. They are so simple and so much fun. As a result, everyone will be laughing in no time! The best part, they are often super simple and use things you already have at home. Happiness is Homemade has some great ideas!

Let’s Wrap It up

In conclusion, I hope this post helped you get some simple ideas of family activities you can do for Valentine’s Day. Even though Valentine’s Day often sneaks up on us, I’ve provided you with lots of ideas that will hopefully reduce your stress around it. Therefore, I hope you try them out and comment below to let me know how they went!

Here is a consolidated list of the materials I use in this post:

• heart shaped hole punches
• construction paper
• white lima beans
• pompoms
• tweezers
• empty chocolate box
• canvases
• contact paper
• paint
• old credit card or gift card
• Q-tips
• red plastic cups
• craft kit
• cardboard
• bamboo skewers
• clay/play dough
• cardstock paper