Flowers of Love

I like Valentine’s Day.  I also thinks it’s an overrated day!  Why is it we use ONE day a year to celebrate and say “I Love You?”  It should be an everyday thing! 

Of course, it is fun to do activities with the kids!  I was browsing around some of my favorite blogs I like to follow.  I came across this one by Teach Mama, http://teachmama.com/2010/02/our-love-tree.html

I liked this idea, but right now it’s –20+ degrees in our neck of the woods!  I wasn’t feeling like freezing my toes off to find sticks that would work for a tree.  So my creative brain had to get to work!  I pulled out my tub of  random items and this is what I came up with!

This picture shows two things: two very cute kids and one awesome vase of flowers! 

I took various colors of pipe cleaners inserted them into straws. These are the “stems.”  I think we made about 30 of them.  Then I found a vase and Josie and I used some colored glass beads to put in the vase.

Then I put all the “stems” into the vase.  I actually put the stems in first, then filled in around it with the colored beads.

I had bought a stash of scrapbooking paper at the Dollar Spot at Target.  Chose some patterns and used two heart cookie cutters and made some hearts!

When the kids got home from school, we went to work!  They had to think of ALL the people they love.  And let’s just say, their list is long!  We are blessed with lots of fun people in our lives that the kids adore!  We had to include two special people: Jayden’s teddy bear and Josie’s baby doll that they sleep with.  I was really happy with the thoughtfulness they had.  And of course their teachers and the teachers’ helpers made the flowers too!  I hope they learned something about love and why so many people are special to us.

I had paper punched a hole in each heart.  When they got done writing a name, I put it through the pipe cleaner and bent the pipe cleaner so that the heart would stay on.

Here is looking up at the flowers and the names on the bottom.

I arranged the flowers like a bouquet.  What was nice was I could pull as much of the pipe cleaner I needed to out of the straw and the straw stayed secure. So we had a nice full bouquet of flowers!

And now we have a cool centerpiece for our table.