Valentine’s Day crafts are some of the cutest crafts that children will ever make! Here are 6 of my favorite Pinterest-inspired Valentine’s Day crafts for kids of all ages:
Have fun with your babies & toddlers this Valentine’s Day! This site has some great, hands-on ideas using items that you likely already have on hand. My favorites are:
I absolutely adore this heart mosaic craft. I hope to have our younger elementary children do this activity. You can adapt it for preschoolers by tracing a heart shape from contact paper and have preschoolers add pieces of tissue paper to make a stain-glass mosaic.
Another heart mosaic craft but this is geared more toward elementary children and preteens because it provides a challenge for them. I think even boys might like the challenge.
As a girl, I enjoyed Valentine’s Day in our house. My mom always made it special with decorations, candy, cards and a red & white dinner (i.e. spaghetti, lasagna, etc.). I have tried to make new traditions with my family for Valentine’s Day and one thing we all enjoy are sweet treats.
If you’re looking for sweet treats for your own children or children at your church, check out six (6) of my favorites, courtesy of Pinterest.
Kids can stick wooden sticks into fresh-from-the-oven sugar cookies and then decorate the cookies with icing and all kinds of fun sprinkles and candies. Great for preschoolers & school-age children.
This snack features fruit, but you can use that heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut many foods – apples, pineapple, mango, kiwi, bananas, strawberries, cheese, bread, brownies, cookies. Great for toddlers, preschoolers and school-age children.
This month, our church has encouraged families with elementary, middle, and high school students to worship together in lieu of their regular Sunday morning programming. It was an idea that surfaced at the end of last summer and again this past April at a staff meeting. It wasn’t really a hard decision for us to make because of two observations: (1) last summer it was almost impossible to recruit volunteers to serve because of August travel schedules and (2) summer is a good time to try something different. We had also been asked by several families to promote this type of initiative.
After a number of collaborative brainstorming sessions between Children’s Ministry, Student Ministry, Worship Arts, invested parents and Senior Leadership, we decided to go for it. But we wanted to be strategic about our approach.
We wanted to give advance notice to our congregation, so we began announcing this change a few weeks out. Our first announcement fell on our VBS Celebration Sunday (when there were many families – regular attenders and visitors – were in attendance.) Our Family Pastor even gave the children a bit of a teaser by announcing that a special ticket book might show up at their house. *See below for more info about this.
In addition, a number of promotional material was prepared. We contracted a designer to create a Worship Together logo that was used on promotional material through the Sunday bulletin, our weekly e-newsletter, a letter that was mailed home to parents, our website and video. Our promo videos included a rising 6th grader being ‘interviewed’ by one of our preachers; a skit by members of our Family Ministry team and one by me (gasp)!
We acknowledged that some parents & families might be a little apprehensive about worshiping with their younger elementary-aged children. We wanted to ease their fears a bit and supplied a “Worship Together Resource” handout for parents to download from our website. You can take a peek at that here. (I will also place a pdf copy under the “Parent Resources/Downloads” tab on this blog.)
Being very intentional about including children and students in the service is something we also desired. This included a special blessing that parents could over children and students on Communion Sunday; creatively telling the Bible story through skits (involving children & students); and using examples that kids could relate to. Our contracted designer also designed a pew card that explained the elements of the service and why we do them.
Supplying children’s worship bags was also a way for us to be intentional about including younger children in the service. Each bag (a small, bright yellow plastic bag that I had on hand from a previous event) was filled with crayons, a pencil and that week’s specially designed children’s bulletin. Our children’s bulletin was a one-page bi-fold which included a cover page; a place for older children to take notes (write down the scripture, who was preaching & what they learned); a place for children to circle corresponding pictures every time they sang a song, prayed, gave an offering, took Communion and read their Bible; and 2 activity pages (we varied the activities each week and chose crosswords, coloring pages, decoder puzzles, mazes, etc.) Remembering that we were catering to children in grades 2-5, we wanted to offer a balance of activities to suit the wide age span.
Earlier I mentioned a special ticket book for families. We mailed a ticket book to families with elementary-aged children so that the children could redeem tickets each week for a special small treat. We chose some items that corresponded with the scripture text as well as general items like pencils and bookmarks.
I am hearing pretty good feedback from parents and other adults about how much they’ve enjoyed worshiping together and seeing the children in worship. Our prayer is that Worship Together would become a regular practice among families at our church.
