Writing up Valentine's Cards with Preschoolers

Making Printing Fun & Working on Alphabet Skills for Valentine's Day

Feb 4, 2009

A fun way to get your children working on their alphabet and printing skills is with Valentine's Day cards. Here are great ideas for preschoolers and kindergarteners.

First, it’s good to give your children a lot of time to work on their cards. You want printing to be fun, not an arduous chore to get all 20 cards done the night before Valentine’s Day. Ask your child’s teacher for a list of all the students’ names about two weeks before Valentine’s Day, so your child can work on a few cards a day until the big day arrives.

Alphabet Skills

You can get individual letter stamps for the whole alphabet and an ink pad (try a red or pink pad to go with the Valentine’s Day theme) to address the cards. Work with your child to sound out the names of her friends and help your child pick out the right letters to stamp out the names on to cards.

Another fun thing to do is get some old magazines and cut out the letters needed for the names. Together you can pick out and cut out the letters. Then make a game of pasting the letters in as straight a line as possible or try out interesting patterns.

You can also use the computer together and pick out fancy fonts and different colors for the names. Then print, cut and paste them to the cards.

Tracing

Children who want to be printing, but aren’t quite there yet, might enjoy using a letter tracer. You can make a game of it by telling your child what letter to do next and see if they can find it on the tracer.

Printing Practice

If your child can print a little, but printing on the small Valentine card itself is challenging, get her to practice on a separate sheet of paper. Draw boxes about the size of the space she will have on the card and have your child practice printing names in the boxes. If your child is up to it, she can try printing on the card. Otherwise, pick out the best ones from the sheet of paper and cut and glue them to the cards. You can use plain white paper or get some colorful construction paper.

Another idea is for you to print the names in a thick felt and have your child trace over them. Or you could do it vice-versa, where you write the words out in pen and the child traces over in a felt. There are all sorts of great coloring tools out there to make it look artistic, such as glitter markers or a rainbow-colored pencil crayon.

Mix it Up

Mix and match these ideas as you like. If your child is losing interest, sometimes switching colors or mediums can do the trick to keep them on track.

Children love Valentine’s Day, so it’s a great way to get them excited about printing and learning their letters.

The copyright of the article Writing up Valentine's Cards with Preschoolers in Kids Holiday Activities is owned by Tamiko Nicholson. Permission to republish Writing up Valentine's Cards with Preschoolers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.