Conversation Candy Hearts-Activities for kids to use them up

I don’t know about you, but by the end of Valentine’s Day, we have a ton of little boxes of those heart conversation hearts! You can only eat so many, and really, the white ones are the only good ones! So what to do with all those little hearts? I’ve found four different activities for kids to use them and learn at the same time.

 

There are so many ways to enjoy those little heart conversation hearts! Not only can kids work on reading each heart, but they can enjoy science, math, crafts, and eating the hearts!

Last year, I planned a lot of activities with the conversation hearts and ended up buying a bit bag of them! More than I ever needed! My son enjoyed eating the hearts once he was done with some of the activities, but we didn’t get close to eating the entire bag! I think if we had a couple of boxes would have sufficed for the activities.

This year, I’m anticipating that he’ll get more than a couple of those boxes of conversation hearts from his preschool classmates, so I want to plan activities to use those boxes, rather than, most likely, throwing them away.

I wanted to find simple ideas to create, learn, and experiment with the little conversation hearts and I found some. Here are different activities that meet the criteria I listed:

Math with Conversation Candy Hearts:

Teachingmama.org offers free printables to work on patterns, counting, color sorting, and graphing. It’s a simple way to use the conversation hearts and your child still gets to eat them up at the end of the activity! We used the printables more than once during our homeschool preschool class.

Mordernpreschool.com also offers more free printables to work on patterns with conversation hearts.

Science with Conversation Candy Hearts:

Teachingmama.org offers an experiment on the same page as the printables to watch the hearts “dance”.  All you need is conversation hearts, water, baking soda, and vinegar. Put a tablespoon of baking soda with 2 cups of water in a jar or vase. Drop in a few candy hearts. Then slowly pour 1/2 cup of vinegar into the water mixture. Wait a minute or two and you’ll begin to see the hearts “dance” up and down.

Fun-a-day.com offers an experiment to see which liquid dissolves the little candy hearts the quickest (and what happens to each liquid and heart when put into the liquid). They use soda (or pop as we say it in Minnesota), vinegar, water, rubbing alcohol, and air. You can have the child guess if the heart will dissolve, float, sink, change the liquid colors. There are many different guesses the child can make with these experiments.

 

Crafts with Conversation Candy Hearts:

For this craft, I was inspired by other activities I saw but decided to make apple trees, into heart trees! This is a very easy activity that doesn’t require any special material that you wouldn’t already have!

Supplies Needed:

Construction Paper cut into little strips of varying sized rectangles (I actually used these foam pieces because they are sticky on the back)

Conversation Candy Hearts

Glue

White piece of printer paper or construction paper

I added in extra gummy hearts that we had to use up too!

Instructions:

Prep the strips of construction paper into different sized rectangles. You want one the size of the trunk and then strips for branches for the tree. Use brown, red, pink…whichever color your child wants for the tree!

Have your child glue the strips of paper onto the white piece of paper to make a bare tree.

Once all the branches are in place, add in the conversation candy hearts as leaves on the tree.

Let the paper dry flat before moving it, otherwise, all the little candy hearts will slide down because of the weight of them.

 

Treats with Conversation Candy Hearts:

Sippycupmom.com has a great idea for playing tic-tac-toe. My son loves playing tic-tac-toe and this is a wonderful way to play with your food! I did switch up the frosting a little bit and just made my own instead of using the candy melts. That way I could control the thickness of the icing that I use.

The icing is the same recipe I use for my sugar cookies that I make. You can control the thickness and it hardens quite nicely.

Ingredients:

1 cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1-2 tablespoons of milk

1-2 drops of lemon juice (this wouldn’t necessarily be required for this treat because there’s not a lot of icing on the graham crackers. It’s used to counteract the sweetness of the powdered sugar)

Add food coloring to change the color to the desired color.

You can put the icing in either a piping bag or plastic zip lock bag and make a very small cut in the corner to make the lines.

 

Now I have a battle plan to tackle all the conversation candy hearts that we are going to be receiving as Valentine’s and I’m excited to do all these tasks with my son!

Do you have any other activities for kids to use those candy hearts that they are bound to receive?