Read Aloud: How to Catch a Loveosaurus
This book was super cute to read, was full of words of affirmation, encouragement and all about kindness. We did a hot air balloon craft to go along with the “Love is in the air” theme in the book.
Materials Needed: construction paper, glue sticks, scissors and clip art if desired.
I precut all the shapes beforehand as to keep the time limited to thirty minutes but depending on the child, group size, and their specific needs there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be done themselves. This whole activity took the full thirty minutes to complete including the book.
Cooking in the Classroom: Chocolate Suckers
Needed Materials: meltable chocolates, sticks or skewers, wax paper, assorted candy decorations, and something flat, like a baking sheet, to lay suckers on.
Follow directions on the chocolate bag for melting or heat in the microwave for 30 seconds increments, stirring in between until chocolate meets your desired texture.
Using a spoon, scoop the chocolate onto sticks, which should be lying flat on the wax paper already. Cover approximately 3 inches down onto the stick to ensure the chocolate is secure so it will remove from wax paper once hardened easily. Once your desired size chocolate is placed, go ahead and decorate as desired.
These pops take up to 30 minutes to dry at room temperature or 5 minutes in the refrigerator. Overall, not counting hardening time, this was an easy and delicious 15-minute activity that all ages enjoy, with little cleanup & minimal effort.
Science: Candy Heart Predictions
Materials Needed: candy hearts, writing utensils, cups for your liquids, measuring cups, liquids (ex. water, soda, oil, vinegar), and worksheets to track your predictions and observations.
To start we used a measuring cup to pour out our liquids. This is not necessary, but I think it helps to make them make more sense and see the fractions come to life.
We then grabbed our pencils and worksheets to write our predictions down. For the younger students, we had them just draw their predictions rather than the older kids who actually wrote them out. Then, we simply dropped the candy into the liquids one at a time and wrote or drew the observations. This all together took around 25 minutes and was a great experiment with kids from kindergarten to seventh grade.
Craft: Heart Shaped Sun Catchers
Materials Needed: wax paper, tissue paper, paste, scissors, hole puncher, yarn or string and paint brush.
Instructions: Lay wax paper flat using a size not much bigger than your desired shape. You can draw a shape with a pencil or put the glue down in the shape you want to give the kids some added direction. I precut all the tissue paper into small squares, with older kids they could do this step themselves, just keep in mind that added time if you’re on a budget. Have them spread the paste out with their paint brush to make sure there aren’t globs as this will cause a longer drying time. They will lay the tissue squares over the glue then lay flat for them to dry.
They will most likely need about an hour to dry, so you could use the following day to cut them out, punch a hole and string them with whatever you desire.