Last Minute Mel: Valentine's Day School Gifts

On Valentine's Day each year, the kids always make a home-made Valentine for each child in their class. This year I showed the kids some pictures I found online and each child immediately chose the Valentine that they wanted me to make. The oldest child chose to make a paper airplane carrying a message, inspired by the one from While She Naps.

We weren't so ambitious as to make an origami plane, we just made the standard paper plane, which he decorated with markers and rubber stamps. I thought it would be a bit much for him to write the message (U R plane awesome!) over twenty times (one for each child in his class), so I had him write it once and then I scanned and copied it, so all he had to do was write the name of each child, which was much more manageable. He was thrilled with the finished planes, and wanted to make an extra one for himself to play with.

It's always the simplest things that kids love playing with...I must remind myself of this at Christmas time and Birthday time.... And I liked how it didn't have any candy attached to it, since they end up with so much candy anyway.

His brother chose a downloadable guitar valentine from Zakka Life. This wasn't much of a surprise as he really really really wants to learn the guitar. But not just any guitar - a rock ‘n roll guitar “and if I can’t learn on a real rock ‘n roll guitar, then I don’t want to learn to play at all.” Okay, you might be waiting a while then, little buddy....Anyhoo, he was very excited to assemble the "guitars", and totally stoked that his valentine involved a lollipop.

Then we made the boxes that they take into school to put all the Valentine's Cards that they get from their classmates into. We decided on robot/monsters and I spray painted the boxes for a rustic, recycled look. For a more polished look, covering the box in construction paper, or scrapbook paper, or gift wrap, would be better, but we were going for the beaten up look, so the spray paint worked fine. I only put on two coats because it was in the teens, temperature wise, outside...so the robots were lucky they even got two coats.

We made cardboard heart feet and cardboard tubes for the arms. The eyes were styrofoam balls attached to the box with craft wire that was twisted to make the googly eye effect. The kids were kind of worn out at the end of this project and so they weren't really interested in adding heart stickers or stamping etc. but they might do this between now and Valentine's Day.