¡Felíz Día del Amor y la Amistad! (San Valentín)

Hope you have a Happy Love and Friendship Day! Or St. Valentine's Day!

In Mexico, this day is celebrated mostly the same as in the U.S. Lot's of hearts, pink and red decorations, balloons, etc. It is very commercial. Hershey's chocolates are sold everywhere. Same with heart lollipops. In our family we don't usually celebrate this day in a big way. But since my students at school bring me gifts, I made them some heart bookmarks I found at another blog (mmmcrafts). And I had the girls make some heart baskets with a tutorial from Pam's blog Gingerbread Snowflakes.

As always, the girls went crazy. I have them make a simple craft, and they add their own ideas. Here are the photos.

I used simple colored bond paper for the baskets.

I used a pattern I made, and marked the lines for the girls to cut.

I gave them two colors to combine in any way.

I kept the pattern simple with only two "legs" for weaving.
Here is one the the first finished hearts.

Another color combination.

Then all of a sudden out came the colored pencils
and markers.

And they started decorating the hearts.

Where do they get these ideas?

Imagine what they would do with
a bottle of glue and glitter!

These are my "plain" hearts.
They look sad compared with the girl's hearts.
This was a very easy and cheap craft.
The marking, cutting, and assembly can be done
in 10 minutes.

And these are the bookmarks I made for
the girls. I used colored stockboard
so they wouldn't get dirty so fast.

One of the girl's mom made these for the whole classroom.
Rice krispies with marshmellows.
I don't like marshmellows too much,
but these tasted pretty good.

All the girls brought something for each other.
Here's one girl's treasure.

And some of the gifts I recived from the students.
Do you see the celophane bag? Inside was a box of chocolates and....

.....a tiny mug that reads "With love, for my teacher".
I think it's really cute.

As I said before, we usually don't celebrate this day, but after seeing Pam's cake recipe on her blog, I've decided to make it tomorrow to celebrate one more day of living as a loving family. My kids will probably celebrate a "day of loving cake". So I guess everybody will be happy.

Hope you have a beautiful day tomorrow, whether you celebrate St. Valentines Day or not. And wish me luck with the cake, I'm not the world's greatest baker.....

P.S. As you can see, I found the cable for downloading photos from my camera. Where were they? Under my bed!!!!