How do you feel about how your kid's class is celebrating Valentines Day?

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kat_eden , Parent asks:

Both of my son's teachers (preschool and first grade) have asked that for Valentine's day we send in valentines for each child and that we don't put names on any of them to make distribution easier.

It feels like we're kind of white washing the fun out of this holiday. I understand why teachers made the shift of asking each child to give a card to each child (to avoid the hurt feelings that were always felt by the kids who didn't get many cards). But now that we're dropping names, it almost feels like a "why bother?" to me. Especially since most kids will deliver storebought cards with pictures from movies.

Are we really ready to have valentines day become one big movie commercial?

In Topics: Family fun / holiday celebrations

> 60 days ago

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Danielle

Feb 11, 2009

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from a fellow member

It does seem odd and my son's teacher asked the same thing when he was in preschool. Now that he's in kindergarten, we're required to send in valentines for every child in the class but can write names on them. On the one hand, I agree with you, it does take out a lot of the fun for kids when they can't decide which favorite friends to give valentines to. On the other hand, it's heartbreaking to be the kid in the class who gets no valentines, as you watch your classmates counting their up, so I see both sides. We ask our son to put a personal touch on his valentines by making them himself, or at least drawing something on each one that's store bought.

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prekpages writes:

As a veteran preschool teacher I can relate to why your child's teacher asked for "no names" on the cards, preschoolers typically can't read. I am alone with 22 four year olds and trying to have each one "deliver" the cards to the correct person is virtually impossible and a veritable recipe for disaster. When I tried having my preschool students deliver their cards with names it took over one hour to distribute them all, as a parent you know the attention span of most 4 year olds- about 5-10 minutes so chaos ensued. Once we stopped having parents put the names on the cards it became much more manageable and took much less time.

The trend of giving each child a Valentine is considered PC these days, like or not. I can assure you, if a teacher allowed students to only give cards to those they liked he or she would probably make the parents of the students who didn't receive many cards irate. Irate parents make for irate principals etc.

As for over-commercializing the holiday, you can help with that and make sure your child does not buy those types of cards. Over-commercialization of every holiday is, sadly, the norm in the US these days.

Best of luck,
Vanessa
Pre-K Pages dot com

Resources:

http://www.pre-kpages.com/valentine.html

> 60 days ago

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dgraab , Parent writes:

Hi, Great question!

Here are some homemade card ideas that you might consider to put the heart back into Valentine's Day:
http://www.education.com/seasonal/valentines/homemade-cards/http://www.education.com/seasonal/valentines/

Even without student names attached to each one, they would still show thoughtfulness and originality, and your boys could have a great time creating them too.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet heard how my child's teacher will be celebrating Valentine's Day in class, but I'll be sure to share with her the link below to a variety of activities, crafts, printables, books and party ideas to help her planning along.

Thanks for asking!

Resources:

http://www.education.com/seasonal/valentines/

> 60 days ago

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