The Power of Love and Paper

Making Valentines

Why do we make Valentines at Playschool?  You won't find us making holiday decorations for all holidays.  Different families celebrate different holidays in different ways.  We want to be respectful of all and leave many celebrations for families to have at home.  However, we do make Valentines--because they pack a powerful message--yes, a message of love--and a message about making meaning.  Valentines show children the power of a letter.

In Creative Art and Play, many of the children are not yet writing or even pre-writing.  But they can still make messages with their paintings and collages.  Your delight when you open an envelope of your child's creations shows your child the power of their creation.

So, how did we make Valentines with our 2-4 year olds?

We started with sensory paintings to make some great textures.  Remember the shaving cream paint from Week 1?  It felt so good to stick our hands in the shaving cream and swirl in the color.  I made sure every child printed at least one shaving cream painting, so for Valentines we could rip, tear and cut it into collages on hearts.

I pre-cut the hearts when children were not in the studio, because as a general rule, I don't cut, draw, paint or sculpt for children.  If you are really working hard to learn how to cut, and I cut a perfect heart in front of you in 30 seconds, you might be a little discouraged and you might want me to cut everything and you might even feel like your cutting is no good.  So I just made the heart shape paper appear along with other Valentine themed stickers and collage papers.

Collages are awesome because you take one thing, tear it or cut it into little bits, and then glue it together to make a totally different thing.  It's magic.  You can still see bits of what it was, but now it's something else.  (Sometimes, I see my children this way...a collage of my family.)

So what might you say to give power to the artists of these Valentines?  First and foremost, all of us would say something like, "I can see how much you love and care about me, because you made something just for me.  Thank you!"

Then the artist would appreciate us taking our time and looking at the Valentine.  We can show our children how much we value their work by describing to our child what we see.  The colors, the shapes, the type of paper.  We can ask questions, asking our child to explain how they made the Valentine.  Our kids will know their work is great when we look at it carefully.

We also made paintings Valentines' week with special shiny watercolors.  You can see how organized the table is for painting with the watercolor sets.  I wanted to give the children a visual message that this kind of painting requires you to choose a spot and work patiently.

 

I had thought these paintings might become Valentine collages too, however they stayed whole.  Maybe they will be transformed in a different collage someday soon.

Look at the different ways the children experimented with the paints.  The painting on the left shows a child trying each color carefully to see what these paints look like.  The paint is brushed on in separate stokes with space around each paint.  The middle painting is blots of different colors, showing testing of the paint colors and the way the brush splats on the paper.  The blots run together though, showing that the child was interested in pushing the brush in different colors and in the experience, but not in the final product visually showing each color as distinct.  Then the painting on the right fills the entire paper, layering the different colors in big brush strokes.  The colors all run together here--the child was experimenting or experiencing the way the paint and water flow onto the paper and blend.  Knowing what each separate color does was not important.