Teaching Patterns with St. Valentine!

This St. Valentine’s Day Themed Banner offers a teachable moment for introducing patterns, and a fun finished product for decoration!

As keepers of the home, it so special to bring the joy of different feast days and seasons alive for the children to visualize! We can do this is simple ways throughout the year. Today we found a teachable moment to introduce patterns while creating a festive St. Valentine’s Day banner for the window over our home altar.

Teachable Moment, Introducing Patterns

When I first thought of this craft I was considering for something to add to our window for St. Valentine’s Day. I wanted to bring in the season of winter with a symbol of Valentine’s Day. I decided on a banner to hang above our Our Lady of Mt. Carmel statue. I knew I wanted three hearts to represent the Holy Trinity, and would place decorative snow flakes between them. This became a great opportunity to allow Rose to help create something for the home and discuss patterns! When we were ready to hang the banner, she had to predict what would come next on the banner string before placing it on. We were learning math, building critical foundations, and having fun!

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The Craft!

Materials:

String or twine
A way to hand the banner. We used duck tape. You can use hooks, tape, specialty hangers, suction cups! Whatever works for your space.
3 plain wooden heart ornaments
4 plain wooden snowflake ornaments
Red, white, and blue paint
Sponge Brushes
Scissors
News paper to cover the work space

We ordered our ornaments from Christian Books. They are affordable, good quality, and made in the USA! Two of our snowflakes came broken, and they replaced them for free with 2 day shipping!

Start by painting your wood ornaments. We did the painting on two separate days. Hearts on one day and snowflakes on the next. This is not needed, but just the way our schedules worked out this week!

To paint the hearts we used red and white and mixed them for pink . We used blue and white for the snowflakes. Sponge brushes helped us to get a textured look and were also fun to layer.

We let some stay translucent so the wood looked tinted by applying one light layer. For others we layered on the paint to get tons of color!

Next I took the twine and measured it up against our window. I added a few inches on each side to account for taping it down. You may need to tie a knot at each end if you are using suction cups or hooks. I cut the string and we were ready to hang the ornaments.

Patterns While Hanging!

With all of our ornaments dried and the string ready, Rose took each piece and placed it on the string. You can space them nicely after the string is hung. We started with snowflake, and then I suggested a heart next. I repeated the ones we hung already, “Look! Snowflake, heart, we can make a pattern! What comes next?” Rose hung the next heart. I repeated them all again and she would tell me the next shape in the pattern. We did this until they were all hung.

Finally, I taped the banner in the window by our home altar, adding a St. Valentine’s Day themed touch to our home! We also were able to talk about a great saint, and work on some math skills!