Three Easy and Meaningful Valentines Crafts | Family Futures (2024)

It’s just one week until Valentine’s Day 2024! Now is a great time to spend some quality time with everyone and anyone who brings joy to your life. Easy, low-mess crafts like these are great ways to spend intentional time together while also developing a variety of skills.

As a special bonus, we made some free PDF printables to help you complete the following crafts. These printables are easy to use for your own crafting ideas too, so get creative and have fun with it!

Heart Trees

This craft involves:

• Scissors
• Regular white paper
• Colored construction paper or markers
• Glue or Tape

First, take out a piece of blank white paper and draw a big tree trunk with lots of branches stemming off from it, but no leaves. If you’d prefer, instead of drawing a tree you can also use our printable version here: Tree Silhouette

Second, take out another piece of paper and cut out small hearts. You can use white paper and color in the hearts yourselves, or you can use colored construction paper. To make things easy, we also made a printable with easy cut-out hearts here: Valentines Day Heart Small. If possible, this is a great opportunity for your child to get some cutting practice and develop their fine motor skills, under your supervision of course!

Lastly, use glue or tape to place the hearts down like leaves on the tree. You and your child can exercise creative freedom deciding where the hearts go and what colors to use throughout.

Bonus step: If you’d like, write one thing on each heart that represents a person, place, or thing that you or your child loves!

DIY Mini Valentines

This craft involves:

• Scissors
• Colored construction paper (lighter colors work best)
• Thin Markers

To make your own mini valentines, use this printable to cut out medium-sized hearts: Valentines Day Heart Medium

You can use white paper or colored construction paper for these, but I recommend using lightly colored red, pink, or purple paper!

Once you’ve cut out the hearts, here are some examples of ways you can make your own valentines:

You can choose to write a message on one side, then fold it in half down the middle of the heart. On the other side, you can write “To” and From”.

If your child is still learning to write, it may be tougher for them to write a full message on this size of paper. So, another way to do these is to have them practice writing their name and other peoples’ names on either side, like so:

Even though there isn’t a message, folks will appreciate receiving a heart from their little loved one!

Thankfully my dogs, Penny and Winston, were available to help me demonstrate this craft. I think Penny liked it!

Love Portraits

This craft involves:

• Regular paper
• Drawing utensils of your choice (pencils, markers, crayons, etc.)
• Scissors (optional)

For this craft, all you need to do is take out a piece of paper and draw a big heart. To make this easier, we made a big printable heart pdf here: Valentines Day Heart Large. Ask your child to draw things they love in the heart, whether it be one big drawing of them doing something like playing outside or multiple small drawings of things like friends, pets, or toys they like. If possible, draw one for yourself at the same time, then after you’re both done, spark a meaningful conversation by telling them about your drawing and asking about theirs. This is a great way to not only give your child the chance to share about what they love, but also to show your child how much you love them by including them in your drawing.

At the end, display the artwork somewhere in your home. As an optional step, you can get some cutting practice in by cutting out the heart and displaying it that way. However, you can also leave it as one whole page if you don’t have access to scissors or if your child took their creativity outside the lines.

Thanks for reading!

We love to hear from folks in our community, so if you try out any of these crafts, please tag us in your post with @familyfutures on Instagram or Facebook!