Valentine's Day Glitter Play Dough and Heart Counting Activity

So last week I shared with you some not-so-successful Valentine's Day activities that I tried to get my kid to do. Today I've got two activities that fared a bit better. 

The first one is Valentine's Day Glitter Play Dough. I found the recipe for this at Eat, Drink and Save Money.

When I was growing up, my mom always made play dough from scratch for her job. (She was kind of like a teacher.) So I was familiar with the general recipe for making homemade play dough. There's flour in this, and I went ahead and used regular flour instead of gluten-free because my daughter doesn't have Celiac and my husband wasn't going to be playing with it anyway.

I got my daughter to participate in making the play dough by helping me stir and dump in the glitter. She wanted to use black glitter... But I steered her back toward the red glitter. I think red is a bit more Valentine's Day festive than black.

So far my daughter has played with this play dough maybe twice since we made it. It sheds glitter like crazy. And mine was very floury even after I mixed all the ingredients. I had to knead it with my hands to incorporate everything.

I think if I make blue glitter play dough my daughter would have liked it more. Blue is her favorite color.

The second activity that we've been doing is Heart Number Counting, or as my daughter calls it "Jump Hearts". For the life of me, I cannot find the original pin on any of my Pinterest boards. But this idea did not generate with me.

So I hand-cut a bunch of hearts out of pink, red, and purple construction paper, and then labeled each heart with a number. You could do this with letters, too, but I didn't want to cut that many hearts and we need number reinforcement more than we need to work on the alphabet.

I laid out the hearts on a rug to keep them from sliding on our hardwood floors. What you do is have the child jump to whatever number you call out. I figured this would be perfect for my kid because she LOVES jumping.

Well, she did like it. The first time it was a little hard to get her interested because her Buzz Lightyear action figure was playing with us. I tried it again, though (minus Buzz), and she was able to hop to the numbers that I called out. (We still get 6 and 9 a little confused.) She even got me to jump, too.

This activity will probably kill about five to 10 minutes of your day. So... yay!

If you're looking for more Valentine's Day crafts and activities, head over to my Valentine's Day Pinterest board for inspiration.