Tag: twinkl

Valentine’s Day Crafts & Activity Sheets

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the small boy and I sat down for an afternoon of Valentine’s Day crafts and activity sheets to get us into the spirit of things. Generally Hubs and I don’t much go in for too many hearts and flowers, we’ve been together since 1995 so we’ve seen more Valentine’s Days together than most, but a heartfelt card and a small token gift is always the order of the day.

We’d already started to make some cute heart shaped decorations using a heart decoration bead kit from Baker Ross. The kits include some nice long pipe-cleaners and lots of colourful beads. You thread the beads onto the pipe-cleaners and then bend into a heart shape. The kit comes with a little bell you can attach to the heart and some ribbon so you can hang it up. It was a lovely, fun activity which we did together. It was also great for helping to develop his fine motor skills which are essential with helping him to learn to write.

Valentine's Day Crafts

A reasonably quick but fun craft we did was to make these heart pets photo frame fridge magnets. Again these are from Baker Ross and they’re really easy to put together. The foam pieces and googly eyes all have peel off backs, so you just peel everything off and stick it together. The small boy enjoyed putting the frame together and making his doggy. He said he’s going to give his frame to Grandad on Valentine’s Day, because he loves him *heart melts*.

Valentine's Day Crafts

Again, the peeling and sticking actions are all great for those fine motor skills, and for exercising his pincer grip, we can’t get enough of that kind of thing at the moment.

Once we’d put our craft box away, we decided to have a go at some of the Valentine’s Day activity sheets we’d printed off from Twinkl, including the Valentine’s Day worksheet and the Valentine’s Day word and picture matching worksheets. These went down very well with the boy, we started with the word and picture matching, he spelt out every word and we looked at the pictures to see which we thought might match the word, he loves this kind of activity at the moment so I was glad we had a couple of sheets of these to do.

Valentine's Day Crafts

The worksheet was a little more challenging for him, he’s not a confident writer, so together we thought about some of the questions and how we might answer them. He verbally listed everyone he loved (dogs first, naturally) and then said his best friend was Daddy. He was getting tired by now, so we called it a day. I didn’t want to push things as that can be counterproductive. It was time for a cuddle and a walk in the park!

Valentine's Day Crafts

We both love our craft afternoons together. It’s lovely to see him focus on a task and enjoy sitting with me. These quiet moments with him are probably the highlight of my week. I think I know who my Valentine is this (and every) year.

Learning: Writing letters and numbers

Over Christmas a few developmental things seemed to fall into place for the small boy and he couldn’t get enough of activity books, specifically practicing writing letters and numbers. Not one to discourage this, I spent a small fortune on activity books, we were going through one book every other day over the Christmas holidays and he was thoroughly enjoying it. But there had to be a cheaper way.

I mentioned this to Karen from That Lancashire Lass and she suggested I have a look at Twinkl. Twinkl is a brilliant website full of fun educational resources for parents, teachers, childminders and home educators. It’s full of more resources than you could ever wish for, and whatever their flavour of the month is (it’s usually fire engines and dinosaurs here) there are loads of easily downloadable activities available. 

We thought we’d start off simple and just print off a number formation workbook and letter formation worksheets. Because we’re fancy, I got my OH to print them and bind them into workbooks (it is here when being married to a printer finally comes into its own), but they’d be fine loose or just stapled together.

Writing letters and numbers

The boy loves them. He’s had them about a week now and he comes home from school every day and wants to do a few pages with us, which is so great, we’ve not wanted to push him to do things too much so it’s a delight that he’s genuinely interested and excited to do things. We had an inset day on Monday so we spent some time doing crafts and working through some pages of his new workbooks.

Writing letters and numbers

Although he’s been able to write his name for well over a year now, I’ve found that since he’s been doing some writing practice every day that his letters are much clearer and smaller, he’s even grown in confidence enough to write Benjamin instead of Ben, it’s a big name for a little boy! As you can see from the above picture he’s totally nailed writing the number 12 too.

What we chose to start our Twinkl journey with were fairly straightforward activity sheets. I’m already planning for a few themed rainy afternoons using some of the downloaded Twinkl resources, so I’ll be blogging them at a later date.

If you need a bespoke resource they have a new tool to create your own resources – twinkl create.  I think Twinkl is a cracking website for anyone who likes doing activities at home with their kids, as well as for teachers needing some inspiration; I’m looking forward to doing some lovely learning with my boy.