Talk to your children before the 14th to find out what kind of cards they would like to give to their classmates this year. If you decide to make your own, allow enough time to purchase supplies and be prepared to only make a few each day. Cutting and gluing 24 cards might seem like fun at first but your child could easily lose interest after the first 4 or 5 cards. If there are any known allergies in your child’s class, considering giving a nonfood item with the card.

If you’re helping at a class party, we have some fun game ideas:

Find The Mate
Buy a box of Valentine cards and cut the cards in half.
Place the cards in a bag.
Have each student pull a card from the bag and look at it.
The students should then go around the room and try to find the person that has the other half of their card. However, this is done by asking questions not by looking at the cards. If a student has a card with a red dinosaur on it, they should start asking other students if their card has a dinosaur on it? Is it red?

Heart Sort
Decide on a few words, base the difficulty on the grade level. You could use words like ‘heart’ or ‘candy’ anything that relates to Valentine’s Day.
Add up the number of letters in the word you’ve chosen. Cut out a heart for each letter once with red paper and then a second set using pink paper. For example: If you have chosen the word ‘heart’ you will need 5 red hearts and 5 pink hearts.
Write one letter from the word on each heart.
Pick as many words as you like for different rounds in the game and create one red set of hearts and one pink set of hearts for each word.
Cut out extra blank red and pink hearts. (The number will depend on the number of children playing)
At the party, pick one word and place the red hearts in one bag and the pink hearts in another bag. Add in the blank hearts.
Divide the students into two teams and have them line up.
Pass the bag down the line, each child should pull one heart from the bag.
Once the bag reaches the end of the line, the children that chose a heart with a letter work together to unscramble the letters and form a word. The first team to solve it wins.
Continue to play by putting the blank hearts back into the bags and discarding the words already used and place the hearts for the next word in the bags.

What’s Missing?
Take a plastic serving tray and fill it with items that relate to Valentine’s Day or items that are red or pink. You will need about 20-25 items on your tray; try to vary the items by size. You want a couple of big items, a few tiny items and then the rest can be average size.

Some ideas include:
Valentine card, Valentine napkin, heart shaped cookie cutter, Valentine cupcake paper, Valentine candy, heart sticker, a foam heart, a red pom pom, a red cup, pink or red pencil, crayon or marker, a red bead, a heart craft stamp, a party horn, a heart doily, a red gift bow. You will need a piece of red felt that will completely cover the tray.

Instruct everyone to sit in a circle. Walk around the circle carrying the tray of items and tell everyone to try to memorize as many items as possible. Once everyone has seen the items, cover the tray and reach in to secretly remove an item. Ask who can guess which item is missing. The person who guesses the correct item wins. You can continue to play rounds of this by returning the item removed and taking off another item. Or you can play by giving each person a piece of paper and a pencil. Once everyone has seen the tray, instruct them to write down as many items as they can remember. The person with the highest number of items written down wins.

Refreshments
Turn an everyday dessert into a Valentine’s party item:
Sprinkle Valentine sprinkles on a cake or brownies.
Add red food coloring to your white frosting to make pink.
Place a couple of conversation hearts on your cupcakes.

Heart Cut Out Cookies

Ingredients:
2 ½ cups of flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
½ tsp. salt
2 sticks of butter softened
1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar
1 large egg
1 ½ tsp. vanilla

Whisk together flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt in a bowl and set aside
In a large bowl, beat together butter and confectioners’ sugar with an electric mixer at med-high speed until fluffy
Beat in egg and vanilla
Reduce speed to low and slowly add the flour mixture until blended
Divide mixture in half. Shape each half into a disk shape. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and place in refrigerator. (Chill at least 1 hr. before using; can be chilled for three days.)

Preheat oven to 350. Take 1 pack of dough out of refrigerator and roll into 12 inch round, 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick.
Using heart cookie cutters, cut out shapes and using a metal spatula, transfer to cookie sheets. Sprinkle with your favorite Valentine’s decorating sugar or nonpareils.(If desired)
Bake cookies 8-10 minutes.
Notes: reroll dough scraps only twice. If rolling dough on a flour surface is difficult, roll dough between two pieces of wax paper.

Or instead of adding the sprinkles before baking, wait until after the cookies are baked and cooled; then spread the cookies with frosting and sprinkle on the decorations.