As you know, I don’t like my kids adding to the candy rush on Valentine’s Day, so I keep thinking of creative ways to do valentines for the kids that don’t involve sugary sweets and boring superhero cards that are thrown away.
For all the kids that love dinosaurs, this will be really fun to make, as well as hand out on Valentine’s Day. When we did this, my son was obsessed, so he had a blast. I found adorable free Friendasaurus printables from Alice & Lois, but instead of buying plastic dinosaurs, we decided to make our own out of clay.
I bought some red oven-bake clay and I already had some dinosaur cookie cutters that we used to make different dinosaurs. We had shapes for triceratops, stegosaurus, t-rex, and brachiosaurus, but only used the first two because the others were a bit too large.
I rolled out the clay into a thin sheet and let my son cut out the shapes. Then we peeled back the excess clay and repeated the process with the leftovers until we had enough shapes for the whole class. We used a straw to poke holes for the string and my son had a lot of fun blowing out the little bits from the straw!
After the shapes are ready, we put them on foil on a baking sheet and baked per the clay instructions. While the dinosaurs were baking, we printed and cut the Friendasaurus valentines, punching holes in the top for the string.
When the dinosaur shapes were hardened, my son put googly eye stickers on the dinosaurs. I helped to string the yarn through the holes of dinosaurs and the Friendasaurus cards and tie the bow. Then my son wrote all his classmates’ names on the cards.
Super easy and fun, and best of all, no candy! It also only cost a few dollars for the clay because we already had the paper and the yarn.
