Easy Valentine Crafts: Heart Spinners!

Looking for easy Valentine crafts? These colorful paper heart spinners are a great way to practice cutting on a line and bilateral coordination skills!

Finding fun ways to practice scissor skills can be tough – it’s easy for kids to get frustrated and when they get frustrated, often they struggle with attention and effort.  Practicing cutting on straight lines can be especially repetitive!

Today, we’re sharing an awesome way to put those cutting skills into action to create a fun, colorful heart spinner!  This easy Valentine craft is perfect for the classroom, the therapy room, or home!

Easy Valentine Crafts: Heart Spinners

What you’ll need:

Construction paper

Yarn (2 pieces, each about 12″ long)

Stapler

Scissors

What to do:

Draw lines to create five 1″ strips of paper.  Have kids cut on each line.  Next, have kids cut all of the strips of paper in half – except one!  So they’ll end up with 8 small strips and 1 long strip.

Fold the short strips into heart shapes and staple them along the long strip of paper in a row (see the video for a demonstration).

Trim off the top of the long strip of paper.

Punch holes at both ends of the craft.  String a piece of yarn through each holes and tie knots to make a loop and keep them in place.

Check out the video below:

To play:

Hold the ends of the pieces of yarn – one in each hand with the hearts stretched out in between.  Swing the hearts around gently to twist the pieces of string around themselves.  Then, pull gently on both ends and watch the hearts spin!

How to change it up:

-My youngest kiddo made his spinner with only 3 hearts on it because he doesn’t sit for art projects for too long!  It still worked great and looked cute!

-These can be rainbow colored like in the pictures/video or you can simplify by using just one piece of paper and cutting it into strips to make a spinner that is all one color.

For Virtual Sessions:

This craft is great for virtual sessions as long as there is a parent/caregiver who can help with the stapling!  Try showing the video and pausing it to let the child complete each step along the way!

We hope you like this fun and easy Valentine craft!  If you make your own heart spinner, we’d love to see!

Post a video or picture on Instagram (@insptreehouse) or Facebook and tag us!

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Claire Heffron

Claire Heffron is co-author at The Inspired Treehouse and a pediatric occupational therapist in a preschool/primary school setting. She began her career with a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism but quickly changed course to pursue graduate studies in occupational therapy. She has been practicing therapy for 10 years in public and specialized preschool/primary school settings. She is a mom to three funny, noisy boys and relies on yoga, good food, and time outside to bring her back to center.

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