Click here to read Easy Valentine’s Heart Garland for Preschoolers to Cut & Create on Hands On As We Grow®
Create adorable Heart Garlands with your kids! This simple Valentine’s garland craft focuses on cutting skills, perfect for preschoolers (3-5 years old). Use up old paper scraps for extra eco-friendly fun!
A heart garland wasn’t in the plan when we started cutting out hearts. George just wanted to do an activity, and cutting out hearts sounded like a good idea since Valentine’s Day is coming up (already!).
And, oh my gosh, who knew that this kid could cut so well!
I really didn’t know what to plan on when we started… I kind of thought it would be an activity that he’d start, but Henry would end up finishing by doing 90% of the cutting.
What you need to make a Simple Heart Garland:
- Scrap pieces of paper – colored in Valentine’s Day colors, or a simple white heart garland out of printer paper would be super elegant.
- Child Scissors
- String or yarn of some sort
- Tape (scotch tape, washi tape, whatever you have handy)
Cutting, cutting, cutting out Hearts
The fine motor skills George has have me baffled! He really impresses me with his cutting skills at this age.
I had a bunch of scrap pieces of paper that I’ve been slowly getting rid of, using up scraps in red, purple, pink and a light blue for our hearts.
I just folded them in half (whether they’re square or not) and drew the half of a heart on it. (George did try drawing his own half a heart, and that just didn’t work. I tried a little connect-the-dot drawing for him to make it, and it still didn’t go well. Just as well, he loved the cutting part.)
Here are some other awesome cutting activities to practice.
George then cut along the line, perfectly. I was so impressed with how well he concentrated and took his time doing it over and over. He did so many of them!
(Note: For those of you wondering, George is 3 years and a few months. He started using a scissors at a pretty young age, I don’t think he was even two yet. And I love the Fiskars scissors. I always swore by the sharp point tip (affiliate link) for Henry, but George hasn’t had any trouble with the blunt tip (affiliate link).)
I loved his reaction every time he opened it up to see he made a heart!
Henry joined us finally too and cut out a few hearts as well.
Turn the Hearts into a Heart Garland!
Finally, they were tired of cutting and I was running low on scraps, so we came up with the idea to make a heart garland with them all to hang in the window.
I got out some red yarn for them to measure and to cut it the width of my dining room table.
They took turns holding the yarn for the other to unroll and cut it.
Henry did most of the assembling while George was napping, but George joined up in the end to do some too.
Henry taped the hearts onto the yarn. He got the pieces of Scotch tape himself and figured out where he wanted each one.
We laid out the yarn across the table and slid the heart underneath it and taped it in place.
To take the fine motor skills up a notch, you could punch holes in each heart and thread the yarn through. But we wanted simple, easy, and just didn’t feel the need to make it more complicated than it had to be.
Then we hung our paper heart garland in our front window to enjoy for the season. We hung a couple garlands streaming from the top of the window, down.
You could also do one long DIY paper garland and make a banner across your window.
Once Louis woke up though, we realized a Valentine’s Day decor was too long (their measuring wasn’t exactly accurate, they’re all sorts of lengths!), and he could grab them and yank them down. So I cut them in half, which just made it that much prettier because we had more to hang!
Looking for a Lovely Week of Valentine’s Day Activities? Here you go!
Oh, by the way, we saved all the scraps from cutting out the hearts to do a Sticky Heart Collage Window Decoration that I shared here!
Do you have any paper crafts to go with this Heart Garland for Valentine’s Day?
Have you tried making a Valentine’s garland with your preschooler? Share your experiences and any creative twists you added to this simple Valentine’s craft in the comments below!
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