Valentine's Wreath

A quick and easy Valentine's craft with minimal materials and preparation.  They can be hung around door knobs for a decoration.


Materials:

cardboard or a paper plate, construction paper, scissors, glue or glue stick, heart pattern (for younger students)
Optional: stickers, glitter, doilies

The easiest way to do this is with paper plates, but in a pinch a piece of cardboard works well.




Process:

1.)  Create a circle for the wreath base.  If students are doing it, have them trace a circular based object and fold the circle in half to cut out the interior circle.

2.)  Cut out hearts.

3.)  Glue a ring of glue around the circle.

4.)  Paste the hearts on, overlapping to hide the base.

Violet the Pilot

Violet the Pilot by Steve Breen is a wonderful book for teaching about children being different because of their interests, while encouraging the idea of girls achieving feats in male dominated areas.  It's a fun story of a creative heroine who builds her own flying machines from junkyard scraps.

After we read, the students created their own blueprint designs of an airplane or flying machine that they would create with common household objects or discarded items. These were based on the blueprints on the end pages of the book.  They labeled the diagrams and then went on to write a story about an adventure in their flying machine.

Materials:  a copy (or multiple copies) of Violet the Pilot, white colored pencils, dark blue paper or construction paper