Reggio-Inspired Valentines

Valentine's Day is a special day that captures the hearts {and sweet-teeth} of our children, and is a day that holds so much possibility for dialogue about love, kindness and friendship.

Children of all ages love to receive and create their own handmade Valentines, and inside my latest YouTube video, I'm sharing several {new!} process-art techniques for creating Valentines cards for sharing, and ways to extend these invitations to include beginning writing.

 But how do we extend our children's Valentine's art to also encourage writing?

Begin with mind-mapping exercises (brainstorming), where you create a bubble map of children's ideas about love / kindness / friendship.

Some ideas for brainstorming:

• People we love
• What is Love?
• What does kindness look like / sound like / feel like?
• What does it mean to be a good friend?

These brainstorming moments are a great way to initiate our kids' prior knowledge. This is the warming-up of our children's brains for learning! 

A read-aloud is another wonderful way to initiate important dialogue about love and kindness, and there are so many beautiful choices.

Encouraging our children to write with purpose, and setting up invitations to play that naturally promote writing are the best ways to build our kids' writing skills. Here are a few suggestions to incorporate writing during your child's play. Be sure to offer "special tools" (new fancy pens, notecards, envelopes, clipboards, etc.) to get them excited about writing!

• cards {get well cards, holiday cards, postcards to friends}
• menus {bake shoppe, restaurant}
• recipes {made-up recipes, familiar recipes - smoothies, parfaits...}
• hand-made books {how-to books, all about me books, counting books}
• invitations {birthday party, holiday party}

Handmade books about love, using your child's process-art techniques, is another beautiful way to honour your child's ideas, and offers a special keepsake - a snapshot of child's thinking about these big ideas.

Watch the video to discover some beautiful, unique ways to use process art as a way to encourage authentic writing.