Need a simple Valentine's Day themed learning activity?
I guarantee you'll love this color heart hunt! This is such a great way to learn colors with your toddler or preschooler.
This hunt works great with small groups or even just 1:1 with your child.
RELATED: Find more of our favorite simple Valentine's Day activities HERE.
I’ve been helping plan my first grader’s class Valentine’s Party, so we were in a heart mood today ❤️ and decided to do a Heart Hunt! This is the PERFECT activity if you need to do something on repeat during those loooong afternoon hours before dinner or bedtime. 🤪 If you’ve been following us for awhile, you know we like to do hunts for pretty much any occasion or theme. 🤣 They are the best 🙌 and never seem to get old. I have over 50 hunts on toddlerapproved.com and those are only the ones we’ve written up.
Materials Needed for a Heart Color Hunt:
- roll of white paper
- markers
- colored cardstock
- scissors
- painters tape
How do you set up a color heart hunt?
It is so easy!
1. Tape a piece of large white paper to the wall with painters tape.
2. Cut out some colorful hearts.
3. Trace some colorful hearts on the paper to match what you cut out.
4. Hide your hearts in visible spots around a room. You can hide them in harder spots as kids get older, but start simple!
5. Attach painters tape to each heart to make it easy to stick up.
6. Start hunting!
7. Match each heart with the heart outline as you find it.
8. Repeat!
We've played this at least 6 times already since we set it up!
What can you learn from a hunt?
So many things! Here are a few:
- fine motor skills
- color recognition (learning the color names)
- color matching
- new vocabulary
- directional words
In this hunt we’re working on simple fine motor skills as we pull and stick the tape. We’re also talking about colors and color matching. Directional words like up, under, beneath, and inside are also reviewed. Hunts are so great for building vocabulary skills! We also talked about making it “not perfect” when you stick the hearts on, because it doesn’t matter. Sometimes my kids get hung up on that, so we practice doing the opposite. It was so funny how she would stick the hearts on and say, “See, not perfect.”
How can you modify this hunt for older or younger kids?
We’ve done this with alphabet letters and numbers before and even names. It is so easy to adapt for different ages of kids.
Big kids can use it to practice sight words or math facts (write the answer on the white paper and hide the equation around the room on the heart).
With younger kids you can work on colors, shapes, or even draw animals or favorite items on here for them to watch.
I can’t wait to see how you use this and make it work for you!
More awesome color activities:
- Color Hunt by Busy Toddler
- Color Scavenger Hunt by I Heart Crafty Things
- Color Hunt and Sort by Toddler Approved
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