Valentine Immitation

I don't have a history of going 'all-out' for Valentine's Day.  Just ask my husband.  For our first Valentine's together, I bought him a copy of "Knowing Scripture" by R.C. Sproul.

Quite romantic...

So it was quite ironic that February happened to be my month to plan our co-op activities.  Our main theme for the month is horses, but my books on the Pony Express did not make it to me on-time and I ended up reverting to plan b.

Call.my.mom.

Planning learning activities is very fun for me and 'usually' comes naturally.  But for some reason, I had a total block.  After wracking my brain for 2 days, I was completely uninspired and getting frantic with co-op less than 24 hours away.

Thankfully, moms have a knack for making everything better.

She calmed me down and gave me a few starting ideas to go along with my book, Saint Valentine, a beauitful picture book about the man behind the holiday.

We read the story about Valentine - a physician by day who prayed for his patients at night and ultimately lost his life because of his faith in Jesus.  It was especially powerful since one of the mothers had almost been imprisoned for sharing the gospel when in another country. 

We ended by talking about how God was the Great Physician and took some time to let the kids each pray for someone they knew who was sick. 

We also discussed the form of artwork used for the illustrations - mosaics,  The kids made mosaic heart cards that they could then send to the people that we had prayed for!  They loved playing with the glue sticks and utilizing their pincer grasps as they picked up tiny bits of paper and placing them on their heart. 

Xander was thrilled to be able to write a whole letter to his Great-Aunt Joy who has terminal cancer.

Afterwards we finished making some yummy chocolate dipped pretzels for our dessert and called it a day!

Later, inspiration struck and I made a matching game with shapes using scrapbooking paper and red foam sheets cut into cubes.  The texture was interesting and the boys had fun playing Memory.

Keegan also enjoyed sorting hearts from largest to smallest!

And I felt like I sort of made up for previous Valentine's failures!