Squishy Heart Sensory Valentine Activity

This post was contributed by Katie of Gift of Curiosity.

Sensory Valentine Activity

My two kids never get enough of playing with things they can squeeze, and this sensory Valentine activity – inspired by a similar sensory activity we did at Christmas – gave them plenty of opportunity to do just that.  Here’s what we did…

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Squishy Heart Sensory Valentine Activity

Materials:

• Quart-sized baggie with heart drawn using a red sharpie marker
• Clear-colored hair gel
• Liquid watercolors
• Glitter
• Colored googly eyes

Steps:

The kids started by squeezing the gel into the baggies. (For best results, use just a little gel. Between the two of them they used less than 1/4 of the bottle.)

Next they added some glitter. After all, everything goes better with glitter!

Then they added the liquid water colors.

Finally, they added the little trinkets I had selected for them; QBoy added letter beads while XGirl added some colored googly eyes.

After I closed up the baggies and sealed the top with duct tape (to prevent little hands from opening the bags and making a BIG mess!), the kids got to work squishing everything together with the goal of turning the clear gel to a pretty color.

Then I invited the kids to “decorate” their Valentine’s hearts by moving their trinkets into the center of the heart.

QBoy decided to take his own approach, however, by putting the alphabet letters in order, but at the bottom of the bag. I went with it, since he was having fun and working on letter recognition, letter sequencing, and fine motor skills all at the same time.

XGirl enjoyed moving the googly eyes around. She found this a bit challenging at first, but then she got the hang of it and started to have some fun with it.

Finally, I showed the kids how they could move all of the gel into the heart outline to make a very pretty heart.

Katie has worked in the education field for over 12 years as both a literacy teacher and as a researcher studying bilingual language development and the value of play. She is currently finishing her PhD in child development, but finds parenting her two preschool age children to be the best education of all. She blogs about kid-friendly activities designed to tap in to children’s curious natures at Gift of Curiosity.

More Valentine Activity Ideas from B-Inspired Mama:

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This post may contain affiliate links.  Please see my disclosure policy.