Heart Stamping

This week for storytime we got ready to celebrate a special holiday - Valentine's Day.  We read some of my favorite Valentine's Day stories (outlined in this post from a few years ago) and did a sweet rhyme together:

I Have a Little Heart

 I have a little heart, 

             (place hand over heart)
And it goes thump, thump, thump,
             (pat chest three times)
It keeps right on beating,
when I jump, jump, jump
             (jump three times)
I get a special feeling,
when I look at you.
             (point to child)
It makes me want to give you,
A kiss or two.

             (blow kiss)

To finish off storytime, we did a special stamping craft.  I've seen the basic idea for this craft in several places online, but this is the blog post that I pinned to my Pinterest board and referenced as I was getting my supplies together.

For a few weeks before storytime I spent some time gathering toilet paper tubes.  Library staff brought some from home, and we also asked the library's cleaning staff to save any that they came across while cleaning our bathrooms, and we had a very good stock collected in only two weeks time.  Just as is described in the blog post linked to above, I flattened the tubes and shaped them into hearts, using a piece of tape to hold the curved pieces in place.  After storytime we gathered around our craft table and I set out the tubes and pans with four different colors of paint.  The kids could dip the heart-shaped tubes into the paint and use them as a stamp to make heart shapes on their paper.  

 The finished heart collages were all lovely, and the kids had a great time experimenting with the different colors of paint.  There was almost no mess with this project either - the kids were warned to be careful with the paint and adults were on hand to supervise, but I really think that most of the kids were so focused on the task of careful stamping that it never even occurred to them to try and make a mess.