Valentine's Day is coming!

 If I was more internet savvy I would say my Aunt Cathy and I should start our own blog.  But I will just share some ideas here for you, my friends and family.  For anyone who cares.  Cathy gave us some fun activities to do.  Here are a few!  I love this puzzle above.  Puzzles like this are so, so good for teaching kids that little pieces can be grouped together to make new shapes.  If you have little ones, investing in puzzles, pattern blocks and other tangram types of games are totally worth it.

 Ah, Valentine's Day is a teacher's dream come true.  There are a hundred easy center and craft ideas to do with hearts.  Above you see some broken hearts Cathy made for us, which are simply matching the alphabet.  This is a great one for Maryn because she knows all her letters if they are together like that, capital and lowercase.  So this is one she can do all by herself...and there's a few colors to make it a bit easier.

If you have older kids, you could do this with matching upper to a lowercase letter, matching sight words, creating compound words, synonyms, antonyms, prefixes, suffixes, math problems, etc. 

 I remember doing these crafts with my first graders!  Once a seven year old learns how to make a heart by folding paper and cutting that tear-drop shape, there's no turning back!  All you need to do is provide paper and they'll come up with all kinds of decorations.  But you can post some pictures or samples around to help them out.  Don't forget heart butterflies!  We haven't made one yet.  But we will soon, I'm sure. 

 But the best Valentines of all

 are my two little sweetlings!

And John, too!  :)

Valentine's Day and the Bible

We've been tying in some of the lessons from Maryn's Sunday School class and her Awana Honeybees.  Their key verse for the year is, "God loved us and sent his Son.  1 John 4:10."  So while we talk about who we love and who loves us, we also talk about how we love Jesus most of all and how much he loves us.  He loves us even more than our Mommies and Daddies.

We read about the good Samaritan yesterday, and how he helped the man lying on the road, even though that man was supposed to be an enemy.  They've been talking about how to be a good helper, and that when we help our parents, we're ultimately helping God.  So we've been talking all the time about ways to help Mommy and Daddy, our neighbors, and our friends.  One of the KEY ways to help Mommy and Daddy is to simply OBEY.  So often our little ones think the only way to help is to get stuff for us, clean up for us, etc.  (isn't that true of us as humans serving God, too?) But we are trying to teach Maryn that simply obeying us is truly a huge help.  And the other way to help us is to spend time with us.  We've talked about how just cuddling with us now and then makes us feel so special and loved.

One of the questions in our catechism is this:  "How can we glorify God?"  And the answer is, "By loving him and obeying him."  So we are trying to teach Maryn what that looks like.  It's a difficult concept, but is most easily exemplified in the parent-child relationship.  It doesn't just mean we serve, serve, serve.  It also means we obey, we cuddle, and we enjoy each other.