Making Heart Maps and Cards
Not just for Valentine’s Day!
These activities are good for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, and writing fun!
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Heart Mapping
What things are hidden in your heart? What things lie deep inside? What are the things you love? Who are the people you love? What do you love doing? The book, Awakening the Heart by Georgia Heard (poetry teacher), has a cover illustration of a heart map. There is even a secret room in this heart, for secrets locked away there. I asked my students to make heart maps. Some of them drew in the ventricles and surrounded the heart with lines to represent the ribs, placing their beloved ideas afloat within the body. Others made layers that revealed the things deeper and deeper in that person’s heart. Every heart map was beautiful and unique. Many were turned into Valentine’s Day cards. Here are free instructions from Georgia Heard, with a heart template you can copy, and instructions from her Blog, How to Make a Heart Map.
To see a variety of Heart Maps, watch Georgia Heard’s TED Talk.
Rosette Stamp Art using Vegetables
Make stamp art using the base of vegetables like romaine, endive, lettuce, bok choy, celery, or any greens growing close together in a single head. Cut off the leaves near the base, and you will see a rosette shape. Use ink pads (try red and pink for Valentine's Day but any color will do) and press the cut side of the plant base on the pad, then on paper. It will look like a rose! If you don’t have any ink pads, try painting the surface of the cut side and then printing it on paper. You can print several roses on a single card cover, or just one. Here’s an example using celery. This is an activity even very young children can do, but all ages can appreciate. The spiral rose pattern is a Fibonacci pattern of fractals, which teaches math and science. Here’s a short video about fractal patterns in nature, created by 4th graders. Go outside, and explore the vegetables and plants in your home, to find more fractal patterns.
Pop-Up Heart Card
Make a pop-heart card, using card stock or thick paper (regular paper can also work, but thicker is better). Fold the paper in half (like a greeting card). Draw an ice cream cone shape along the fold, a shape that is half of a heart, with the fold down at the center of the heart. Cut it out without cutting the shoulder of the heart. You want the heart to pop-up, not be removed entirely, so you need to keep the shoulders of the heart attached to the rest of the paper. In this video of making a pop-up heart, the heart is traced onto paper and the shoulder is darkened, indicating the area where you don't cut. Once the heart is properly cut, with the shoulder intact, reverse the fold so it pops out. Then glue it onto another piece of paper to hide the open back showing a cut-out heart. That way the pop-up is a surprise when you open the card.
Here’s another way to make a pop-up heart card.
How to Make Pop-Ups by Joan Irving has more fun pop-up cards with instructions for kids.
Acrostic Poems
Write an acrostic poem to the recipient of the your card, to go on the cover or inside the card. The acrostic could be the person's name, written down, with words of your choice going across. The simplest one is MOM or DAD, yielding a three-line poem. Any name or word can create an acrostic, or any phrase. A long acrostic could be made from Happy Valentine's Day. Use a dictionary for this writing activity! If you're stumped for a word beginning with a specific letter, just open the dictionary to that letter and browse. A good illustrated children's dictionary such as Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary.
Here's a short acrostic for MOM, and an amusing one for DAD.
M arvelous
O utstanding
M other-of-the-year
D evilishly
A wesome
D ad
Acrostic poems don’t have to have one-word lines. Also, the letters going down don’t have to begin each word or phrase, but could be in the middle of a line. Putting the letters that go down into bold, in a straight row, helps to reveal the acrostic.
Find more acrostic poems for young children in Amazing Apples by Consie Powell and Silver Seeds by Paul Paolilli and Dan Brewer.
Card Making Materials
Astrobrights Colored Card Stock, 25-color assortment
Crayola Washable Colored Markers, 40 colors for age 3+
Dual Tip Markets for Kids, 24 colors
Fiskar “Big Kid” Scissors for ages 8-11