Valentine’s Day Sensory Bins and Activities for Toddlers & Preschoolers

Your valentines will love sensory bin and activities that help them develop fine motor skills and learn beginning math skills while enjoying fun Valentine’s Day materials.

Preschoolers love to touch everything they see. They love to figure out the world around them through their senses.

Creating sensory activities for your preschooler lets them explore safely. Sensory activities that are themed for current seasons and holidays are not only fun, but also another teaching tool.

Check out how to create Valentine’s-themed sensory bins and activities that your preschooler will simply love!

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Check Out this Video on How to Create Valentine Sensory Activities

How to Create a Fun Valentines Sensory Bin

Sensory bins are great fun for young children. They are so versatile, inexpensive to create, and work very well with seasonal items. They are also a great activity for your preschooler to do by themselves so that you can teach your older children.

If you are new to sensory bins, you may enjoy this post on how to create sensory bins. You’ll find everything you need to know about creating these bins, such as good materials to use and themes to use throughout the year.

Filler Items for a Valentines Sensory Bin

• Navy beans
• Red kidney beans
• White rice
• Dyed rice in red, purple, and pink
• Pompoms in red, purple, pink, and white
• Shredded paper in red, pink, or white

Items to Add for Play

• Pompoms in red, purple, pink, and white
• Hearts of various sizes, colors, and materials
• Red or pink items
• Heart erasers
• Wool balls in red, pink, purple, or white
• Red or pink bowls
• Scoops, tongs, or spoons

Examples of Valentines Sensory Bins

Valentine Fun Sensory Bin

Your children will love this Valentine-themed sensory bin! To create this bin, you can use a base of colored rice. This bin contains purple, pink, and white rice. It’s actually being reused from the Advent Sensory Bin made before Christmas. Pink and red pompoms add a sparkly touch. Children can use the metal scoop or red tongs to add the rice or pompoms to the heart mold.

Valentine Hearts Sensory Bin

This Valentines sensory bin with hearts is a simple bin for lots of fun. This bin uses navy beans as the base to make the red hearts really stand out. Your kids will love the hand-shaped tongs they can use to put the hearts into the heart-shaped bowls.

Related Post: How to Create a Valentine’s Day Playdough Tray for Preschoolers

How to Create Valentine Counting Activities

Although I don’t formally teach my 3-year-old yet, I do like to create activities that help him gently develop skills through fun and play. Learning to count is a skill he is just beginning to learn, so I will need to do the following activities with him a few times. Hands-on activities like these are a perfect way to gently transition to teaching preschool at home.

If your child is already able to count and understands one-to-one correspondence, then these activities will be wonderful ones to leave out for your child to do alone. If they are brand new to counting like my son, then the activities are fun ones you can do together.

Examples of Valentine Counting Activities

Valentine Counters Activity

This Valentine counter activity is super easy to put together. Find some counters and numbers and you’re good to go. For ours, I used some wool felt balls that I got my son for Christmas. Then I found the linen hearts in the wedding section of Hobby Lobby. I wrote the numbers 1-10 on ten of the hearts.

You can certainly do this activity with any kind of counters. I just chose the wool balls because I had some in Valentine colors. You could use Valentine erasers, pompoms in Valentine colors, or anything you have around the house that you could use for counting. Wood or magnetic plastic numbers could also be used instead of the hearts.

To use this activity, your child can put the numbers in order from 1-10. They can also use the wool felt balls as counters and put the correct amount of them under the numbered cards. If this is your child’s first introduction into counting, you may just want to use the cards from 1-3 or 1-5 to teach them the concept of how to count. Then you can add more cards as they become accustomed to counting.

Counting Hearts Activity

Matching hearts is another Valentine counting activity you can create. For this activity, I used the rest of the linen hearts from the above counting activity. Then I created a couple of different kinds of heart number cards, those shown and a set of all red with white numbers. You can grab a set of Valentine Number Cards for yourself, if you’d like.

To do this activity, your child can put the correct number of hearts under the numbered cards, similar to the above counting activity. Additionally, if you use the second set of number cards I offer or even wooden or magnetic numbers, then you could have your child match the numbers as well. Then they could also put the correct number of hearts down, or break these up into 2 different activities.

Does your child love to count or are you introducing numbers? When you join the Homeschooling in Progress community for homeschool tips, ideas and resources through your email inbox, you will receive a My Book of Numbers booklet to download and print for your child.

Combine the Counting Activities

Yet a third activity could be to combine both counting activities pictured. Your child can match the numbers together, then put down the correct amount of hearts under each number. Finally they could add the wool felt balls or other counters on top of the linen hearts. That’s a lot of practice for number sense and one-to-one correspondence going on there!

The month of February is a fun month to share lots of hearts and red and pink activities with your little Valentine. Your preschooler will love using hearts to practice counting skills. Using festive-colored tongs and bowls will make the sensory activities that much more fun when they use them to pick up Valentine-colored accessories.

Are you teaching your child colors? You may like this post on teaching your child colors and a related post on great picture books for teaching colors.