This Happy Caterpillar Will Crawl Into Your Heart

Caterpillar Valentine

(This activity will build skills such as tracing, cutting, glueing and printing the child’s name)

Materials: red, pink, and purple construction paper, scissors, pencil, marker, gluestick (or white glue), eyes (or white paper and marker), optional: glitter and other decorating craft material like buttons, ribbons etc.)

Make a heart template – this can be whatever size you want. I suggest 2 to 3” tall, especially for younger children. Trace a heart shape on a piece of paper and cut it out. (This can be done easily by folding a piece of paper in half and drawing half a heart on it then cutting it while folded, then unfold to use as the template).

2. Using the template, (or you could use a heart shaped cookie cutter and let the child draw around it to draw the hearts), draw hearts on pink and red paper (purple too if you wish) – enough for each letter in the child’s name plus one for the head(which could be a little bigger than the others if you wish).

3. Cut all the hearts out.

4. Create the head of the caterpillar:

Cut out 2 small hearts for the ends of the antenna, along with two small strips for the antenna. These can be any of the three colours you wish.
Glue the small hearts to the ends of the antenna, and the antenna to the top of the head heart.
Glue the eyes to the head. (To make from paper, cut white circles and colour in the pupils with marker.)
Draw the mouth on the head.

5. Create the body of the caterpillar:

Cut feet out of purple paper. A simple shape is a “L” shape. Glue the feet to the bottom of the hearts (except the head) with the “L” shape reversed to the feet point left.
Starting with a different colour heart than the head and alternating with different colours beside each other, overlap slightly and glue the hearts together to create the caterpillar. You can glue the head slightly above the others.

6. Depending on the child’s age and ability, have them draw the letters of their name with marker – one letter on each heart. If your child is just learning this, lightly draw the letter with pencil and let them trace over it.