7 Sensory-Friendly Valentine's Day Crafts & Activities
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s time to find some exciting, sensory-friendly crafts and activities to make this special holiday just as sweet as your child's! These crafts will entertain your family, while also helping them build on their motor and speech skills.
This sensory box can be filled with all different textures like cotton balls, plastic hearts, or even marbles. You will feel the different textures, observe the objects, and begin to experiment with the materials in different ways. This activity can help with language development. For example, you can ask your children to describe what different textures they feel, what they see, or ask them to make up stories all while exploring the new sensations of the sensory box. Lastly, this activity helps practice fine motor skills by moving small pieces from one bin to the next.
Directions can be found at this link.
Valentines Play Dough Activity Sensory Tray from Little Bins for Little Hands
This fun craft will help practice your child’s fine motor skills through the various activities with the play-dough. Such as rolling out the dough, molding it into a shape, and using tools and textures to enhance the sensory appeal. This play-dough Valentine’s Day activity tray includes LEGOs, heart cookie cutters, acrylic craft store hearts, buttons, glitter, heart-shaped toothpicks, and XO tiles and stampers.
Directions and homemade playdough recipes can be found at this link.
Valentine’s Day Water Play from Pink Oatmeal
In this activity, you will fill up a bin of water or your sink and dump in foam hearts with several different shapes and colors. The activity is fun and helps practice motor skills by having children do various tasks with the hearts like sidestepping around the water table, sitting to standing at the water table, or scooping water and hearts and walking with the cup to a bucket.
Directions for this activity can be found at this link.
This activity stimulates the olfactory sensory as well as touch. This slime made out of red hots has a texture that kids will enjoy, as well as the smell of cinnamon, and it is soothing to play with.
Directions on how to make Red Hot Valentines Day Slime can be found at this link.
Heart Deep Breathing Breathing
Using the image below you will have your child trace an outline of the heart. As they are cutting have your child practice deep breathing exercises. Instruct your child to breathe in for 5 seconds, hold it for 5 seconds, and breathe out for 5 seconds. Not only will this exercise help with their fine motor skills, but it will also soothe through deep breathing.
Instructions can be found at this link.
In this craft, you will trace an outline of a heart and have your child cut it with scissors to enhance motor skills. For a fun sensory aspect have your child dip their hand in paint and put it at the center of the heart. After it dries let your child decorate with crayons, stickers, or glitter!
Directions can be found at this link.
This craft is great, particularly for kids with limited motor skills or sensory issues – who are not comfortable with gloves or paint and can be scaled to be more or less complicated to your child’s abilities. You’ll need cupcake liners and popsicle sticks, craft sticks, or straws – one for each member of the family. Flatten out the cupcake liners, until you have one big circle. In the center, your child can write a family member’s names, draw a picture, or use an actual photograph trimmed and glued inside to represent someone they love.
Directions can be found at this link.
