The children had a great time celebrating Valentine’s Day and planning activities to do for the day in the before/after school program. The teachers in kindergarten had planned week-long activities to honour Friendship day/ Valentine’s day. The children were excited about the plan in their classroom, so we decided to take this interest of theirs and celebrate also. Our first plan of action was to discuss what kinds of activities the children would be interested in and we researched it on the iPad. The children talked about what they knew about the day from their own experiences. We used their previous colouring interest and thought to provide the children with colouring pages that were valentines themed. We talked about having a snack and decided on making chocolate covered pretzels. The children wanted to make a craft with scissors so we thought about giving them a cutting and gluing activity. We found a really nice paper valentines day robot to build (cut-out and glue) Which most of the children liked. Lastly, we talked about making a dramatic play centre to align with that interest also. We made a post office and used extra valentine’s cards as props and made paper heart crafts to decorate our “valentine’s themed” post office.
The day came and the children enjoyed participating in all of the activities. It was interesting to see the children create their own version of the post office game, and watch them give each other valentine’s cards. I observed the post office being changed into a movie theatre and a police station as they played. The children enjoyed the crafts and were practicing cutting and gluing. They really loved the pretzels, this snack was a highlight ...We weren’t able to melt the chocolates on Thursday due to the snow day, to let the pretzels set for Friday, so we ate the chocolate and pretzels separately. Snack was just as delicious and fun to eat in a different way. At the end of the day, the children were given a special personalized Valentine card with a little gift to take home.
The children are learning about Canadian traditions by celebrating Valentine’s Day and learning to be a special friend and give things to their friends. They also participated in their own learning by planning the activities for the special day which is such and important part of their development.
