Having Fun (And Learning) With Candy Hearts

I love incorporating holidays, themes, and seasons into our learning. It just seems to make it more fun for all of us. One of our favorite learning manipulatives for Valentine's Day is a bag of candy hearts. They can be used in so many ways and are an inexpensive way to bring some fun into your activities. 

We use candy hearts for so many different lessons that we have a little candy heart center set up. This way the lessons as well as the materials are easily accessible, which is helpful since we homeschool. My oldest can work on these activities whenever she feels like it without waiting for me to pull everything out. This would also be a great way to have your centers set up in a classroom, as it will allow several different activities to be switched out quickly and easily based on student needs.

One easy activity we do is building shapes with the candy hearts. I helped my learner out a bit by drawing the shapes on our chalkboard table and she traced them with the hearts. You could also simply draw the shapes, or let them try to create them on their own. This is great for fine motor skills, so Littlest One just practiced making a straight line. (He LOVES to do activities with his sister!)

 We also used these hearts for a great no-prep measuring center. We simply grabbed some materials from around our learning area, and I asked her how many hearts long she thought they would be. Then we measured the items and compared them to her guess, sneaking in a little estimation lesson.

My oldest did a fun science fair project this year on dissolving candy canes in different liquids. We simplified this a bit and used candy hearts instead of candy canes to make a fun Valentine's experiment. We kept it easy and used vinegar, hot water, and cold water.

We have hearts with letters and numbers on them, which I wrote about in this blog post. We use these hearts along with our candy hearts to practice some of our skills. One thing Bug is focusing on now is letter recognition and formation, so she "traces" her letters with the candy hearts.

She has already mastered counting to ten, but we are practicing her teen numbers by using candy hearts with the printable hearts used as counting mats.



The other day she surprised me by modeling addition problems with her princess toys. (Thank you Mickey Mouse Clubhouse!) Because she showed interest in this, we have begun modeling very simple addition problems using the number cards and candy hearts. 

We started by making a number sentence with the hearts and counting the correct number of candy hearts on each addend. Then we moved the hearts to the other side of the number sentence and she counted them together and found the correct sum.

If you're looking for some easy printable candy heart activities, I have this great Candy Heart Activities Pack in my TpT store. It includes 9 different printable activities to do with your kids. They can also easily be used as a center or glued into a manila folder to create folder games. The pack includes both colored and black and white versions of most activities.

This color sort is great for the littlest learners, or even those older ones that need a little review. It makes a basic activity a little more fun and festive.

If your kids are learning to count, these ten frame pages are a great way to add some hands-on practice.

Another way to practice both counting and sorting is to use this graphing mat. It also has an accompanying page of questions that can be answered based on the completed graph.

These pattern cards are a fun way to introduce patterns. There are 20 different cards, as well as some blank cards for students to create their own patterns. This is a fantastic way to assess whether your students have mastered the idea of patterns.

I think this is my favorite activity in the pack. It is a creative writing activity that allows students to imagine what kind of candy heart they would be. It also includes some questions you can ask your kiddos before they begin to design their heart, as well as two different types of versions for them to write on. This would look so cute as a class display!

This is a fun but simple STEM activity. There are ideas included in order to extend the activity and further understanding of using different methods in order to complete the stacking challenge.

These are great ways to incorporate a little sweetness into your learning using just a bag of candy hearts. Do you use candy hearts in any learning activities? Let me know what your favorite lesson is in the comments!

13 Learning Activities With Valentine's Hearts

I love Valentine's Day. Pink is such a cheerful color, and it seems like people are just nicer around the middle of February. Being surrounded by chocolate doesn't hurt either. Bringing a bit of this "love"ly holiday into our learning always seems to excite the kids. (Sorry, I couldn't help it!)

I love activities that we can use in many ways. Since our space is limited, (and I may not be the most organized person), it makes life so much easier. I also don't have tons of prep time, so having one versatile set that I can use to teach many skills is always amazing. These are some of the ways I use this Valentine's Alphabet & Number Set in my TeacherspayTeacher store. They do take a little time to cut out, but considering how many activities they can be used for it is totally worth it. It includes a colored version with two different pinks, a red, and a purple, as well as a black and white version, which I love because I can print them in any color I want!

I try to always have a themed alphabet hanging in our learning space. It not only makes the room cuter, but also has some use to it. It's great to be able to refer to the letters whenever we need to.

My daughter knows most of her uppercase letters, so we clipped the lowercase letters onto the larger hearts. I love how this contains two sizes, so we can easily have a visual for the idea of "big" letters and "small" letters.

I also like to display a number line in our room. I keep it on our dry-erase easel so she can refer to it while she works.

There are so many math activities you can use with these hearts. The larger size works great as a counting mat for young learners.

This is one of our favorite activities. I lay the large numbered hearts out, and she orders them and count the correct number of hearts. (She can use the number line for reference if she gets stuck!) We did this with snowman cutouts and pompoms this winter, and she still loves it!

If your learners are starting to add (or subtract, multiply, divide, etc.), these hearts are perfect for modeling math problems! We use the large numbers as number mats in our problem, but you could also use the small ones. Because we are just starting out with number sentences, I used the smaller math symbols so she could easily find the numbers and tell them apart from the symbols. 

You can also model a problem and have them find the correct numbers to complete the sentence.

The big hearts also make great phonics mats. You can have your kids go on a scavenger hunt for the beginning sound. We found hearts for our letter H, because we currently have lots of those laying around! But you can find a few and have them try to see how many other objects they can find to add to the mat. You can even leave them as a display in the classroom.

You can also have them match upper and lower case numbers. We like to pick a few letters at a time and make a memory match game. You could make it a bit easier by printing the uppercase letters in one color and the lowercase in another. Great for an easy differentiation!

The small hearts also make a great tool for practicing spelling words. We are starting our sight words, so that's what we have been practicing, along with our names.

You can also use small objects to practice letter formation by tracing the letters or numbers.

There are a few blank hearts included. We took one of the large blank hearts and wrote "pink heart" on it and added it to our sensory bin, since that is the shape and color we are focusing on. 

You can also add letters or numbers to your sensory bin. You can have the kids choose a number card, and count that number of objects from the sensory bin.

 These are just a few of my favorite ways to use these hearts with my littlest learners. Can you think of any other activities these would be good for? Leave your ideas in the comments below!?

Learning In An (Indoor) Winter Wonderland

Y'all, it's cold outside. Like, stay in the house, I'm not going out, we can make it one more day without going to Target cold. I know 25 doesn't seem cold to a lot of people, but when you are used to seeing above 90 most of the year 25 is in fact cold. So it's the perfect time for some winter fun and learning in the snow, right? Haha. We live in Texas...

We've had snow in the forecast 3 or 4 times now, but we never get it, or no more than a few flakes. Bug kept asking last night when we were going to play in the snow. Poor baby, I guess we can just pretend and watch Frozen again, right?

We have had some freezing weather which has let us experiment with ice a bit which was fun, but we were in desperate need of some faux snow play. Here is what we came up with for those of you who are snowless like us, or who actually have snow but need some indoor activities to keep the kids warm!

One super-easy project we did that led to lots of unintentional fun was to freeze water outside. It hardly ever freezes here, so this was actually a big deal for us. We froze the water in four see-through plastic cups, with a different amount in three of them. We added salt to the last one to compare freeze times, which led to some cool discussion.

She wanted to check her ice every ten minutes!

When it was (finally!) frozen, we got to play with it. We looked at all the crystals that formed which was really neat. It's crazy to think of the little things like this that we miss every day.

We took the ice out of a few of the cups and put it in the bathtub to observe it melting. We also did this on a slower scale with a dropper and some hot water. (We might have played with some food colors to make it a little more exciting...)

This was fun, but they liked melting it in the bath much better. They wanted fast results!

Another colorful ice activity we had tons of fun with was painting with colored ice. We filled an ice cube tray with water, added a few drops of food coloring to each section, covered it with plastic wrap (to keep the sticks sort of upright), stuck a popsicle stick in each section, and set it outside overnight. The next day the kids had a blast watching it "skate" over their papers! It began melting pretty quickly, but it was still cold enough to stick it back outside and they were ready to use again after naptime. You could also just stick them in the freezer.

He was watching her to make sure he was doing it right. Sometimes it's scary how much they learn by watching others!

Okay, now to the warm activities! After all that ice play we needed a little heat, so we grabbed the cocoa and marshmallows. This was the perfect activity because all three kids got to play. Big Guy was challenged to build a 3D structure out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Bug got to practice her shapes with them (This is a great time to introduce edges and vertices.), and Bear just had fun putting the marshmallows onto the toothpicks. Great for fine motor development! Just don't ask me how many marshmallows were eaten, or how much cocoa was spilled...

When an activity works for an 11, 3, and 1 year old all at the same time, you know it's a winner.

Our marshmallow shapes. And our chalkboard table that needs some serious attention!

Another great idea for marshmallows was to glue them to a letter M. We are really working on letter recognition so this was perfect! You could also just have your kids lay them on top of large letters to trace them for a recognition activity or center. It was also really good practice for the "just a dot, not a lot" rule.

She was concentrating so hard!

Another way we practiced our letters was using these winter letter and number cards I have in my TeacherspayTeachers store. I printed them on blue card stock and we use them for lots of activities, including spelling practice, and I use them as a number line. Here is our current sensory bin (winter blue) with our letter of the day.

Using our sensory bins on a sheet makes cleanup so much easier!

We are also working on number recognition. Bug has her counting down, but doesn't yet know what each number looks like. We numbered some foam snowmen and practiced ordering them. We have our number line displayed on our board, so she could look at that if she needed help. It was really useful.

She definitely liked having a "helper" to look at while ordering her numbers!

After the snowmen were in order, she got to count "snowballs" to put on each snowman. She lined them up so straight and said "They look like his buttons!" It still amazes me when they make observations like this on their own.

Of course someone thought she needed help with her snowballs!

We also did some fine motor practice by having a snowball race across the table. She did a great job aiming the straw to get it across, and we even practiced blowing it off the table and trying to get it to land into a bucket.

Who doesn't love a snowball race?

We're also still playing with these snowballs I posted about on my Christmas Activities post. We have thrown them into buckets, through hula hoops, and the kids may or may not have had a few indoor snowball fights with them.

What is your favorite winter activity for staying warm?

Christmas Activities For Little Ones

Christmas is such a special time around our house. We are always creating new traditions and trying to spend as much family time together as possible. We definitely don't always get everything crossed off our list, but we are usually having fun in one way or another. Holidays are so fun with little ones running around and it's a perfect time to create crafts, work on activities, and maybe even throw in some learning.

There are so many crafts to do with kids around the holidays that I could not even begin to list them all here. Snowflakes are always a great option, and can make fun decorations or ornaments. When I was teaching math, cutting basic snowflakes out of paper squares was a lesson we always had fun with when we studied symmetry. Now our snowflakes are a little more fancy (and a lot messier!) Here is our throwback to those popsicle stick ornaments we all made as kids, as well as some pre-cut foam snowflake shapes that make this activity so easy!

Another classic Christmas craft is these candy cane bead ornament strung onto chenille stems cut in half. We used these to work on patterns. Since these can go on a "kid" tree and will probably be played with, don't forget to knot the bottom and top so the beads don't fall off! If you have an extra small tree this makes a good option for keeping little fingers off your main tree.

You can also get a little more involved in the ornament making and create a keepsake ornament with your kids. They also make really great gifts. We have a few that my oldest made in school when he was a bit younger, and they are some of my favorite ornaments!

My husband is usually still working when I start dinner, so anything to keep the kids entertained in the kitchen is a lifesaver.  A friend of mine made a felt tree for her daughter who loved it, so we made one last year. I wanted to decorate the ornaments with sequins and beads to make it a bit more fun, but like I said, not everything gets crossed off the list... When I get that done I will add ribbons to the back and sew buttons on the tree so they can "hang" the ornaments. Having this activity is another one that seems to help prevent the kids from taking ornaments off the actual tree.

We don't get a lot of snow in Texas, but luckily we found these fake snowballs at Hobby Lobby last year. The kids love trying to toss them in different buckets and containers. We are definitely still working on our motor skills... and aim! If you can't find snowballs you could always use large pom poms, make pom poms out of yarn, or even substitute styrofoam balls. For older kids it would be fun to have a few different buckets with different points assigned to them so they could compete to see who would be better at a snowball fight.

My 3 year old is working on her numbers, so these foam trees make a great "game" for her. One side has the number form and the other has the word form. She can count the correct number of bells, small ornaments, etc needed to decorate her tree. If you can't find the foam trees, I have a similar printable game in my TpT store.

Here is my my Bee counting lights on the printable version:

We like to sneak in learning activities wherever we can. We keep a blank book and pack of small stickers (Thank you Target dollar spot!) in our bag so my daughter can practice "tracing" her letters or name while we're out and about. It keeps her entertained when we are somewhere she has to sit for a while.

Another way we like to practice letters is to make them into an object. I've noticed it really helps with letter recognition. Sometimes we will just fill the letters with stickers, but this time we made the letter "O" into an ornament, and the letter "R" into a reindeer. 

We also like to practice our letters in a festive way, because that always makes it more fun, right? These letters are also available in my store, and you can use them in so many different ways. We have the small ones hung on mini-clothespins to display our number line, and the medium size is hung on a ribbon to display our alphabet. We also use the small ones to match upper and lower case letters and to practice spelling our sight words and names. These are the black and white versions printed on colored cardstock.

Hopefully this will give you a few ideas to keep your kids entertained over the holidays. While most of them are geared towards little ones, my eleven year old still likes to jump into the action and get creative with a few of these, so you can easily adjust some of them for older kids. 

What are your favorite holiday activities to keep the magic going during this time of year?