Making His Love Known

The entire month of February will be dedicated to celebrating God’s love in our house this year. We are also excited to extend His love to those around us, eek! Does anyone else get as excited as I do about celebrating?! Just because we’re not counting down to Christmas doesn’t mean that we cannot celebrate like we would during the Advent or Lenten season. {Easter is just around the corner!}

When I think of Valentine’s Day, I immediately think of the love that I have for my family and friends. We don’t typically associate this day with the love that the Lord has for us. Here’s what I say, Why not?! Valentine’s Day can symbolize the entire reason why Jesus  gave Himself up for us. What a great way to impress God’s Word on our little one’s hearts.  I also know that if my heart’s desire is to get my children excited about their faith, then I need to jump on this celebration train myself. So, here we go!

We are counting down to Valentine’s Day this year by learning a verse on love each day. We have definitely spread the love around our home already and it’s only been a few days into the month! {Embrace the mess, right?!} We started our month off by decorating our home with all things red and pink. Garland was hung over our fireplace and Valentine’s Day bags were hung just like those Christmas stockings… that were just pulled down! Our little bags will be filled with love notes and encouraging words that everyone will get to read on Valentine’s Day.

Our first verse came from 1 John 4:7.

 ^“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”

The kids decorated their first verse on a paper heart and then we drew some hearts on our hands. Each day we are committed to drawing a heart as our reminder to showcase God’s love. It can keep us accountable when we are having a difficult time loving others. Remember the dove ornament that we shared about during our Countdown to Christmas? We are taking God with us wherever we go and these little hearts will remind us of that truth.

Afterwards, we did a science experiment that explained the verse. I found the idea over here. I thought that it was perfect because we were learning all about science with water. {You never can go wrong with a super easy experiment that someone else came up with!}

We simply took a paper towel and shaded the big heart {God} with red marker and then drew a little heart for each person in our family. We talked about how love begins with God and how His love spreads into our hearts. We dipped our paper towel into a bowl of water to see how the red marker transferred into our mini hearts. Cool, right?!

We set up a little station for the kids to decorate love letters with. {Do you remember our Advent calendar? It replaced that.}

For Awanas, the kids were encouraged to decorate cans that will be donated to the local food bank. What a great idea! Fun, easy, and effective. You get major mom points here!

Finally, we went to the library and grabbed a few favorite books. The boys absolutely love those I Spy books so we are going to be thrifty and buy a used copy on Amazon.

Another favorite book series that Peanut loves has a Valentine’s Day version. It is AMAZING! I know that I say this a lot, BUT if you don’t have these books, then get online and buy them! These are some of the best books that I have ever purchased and we refer to them almost daily.

Here’s the description from the source, that describes it perfectly:

There you have it! That’s what we’ve done so far. I love how you can turn any day or holiday into a way that makes Jesus known to little hearts. We don’t need to spend lots of money nor have the trendiest decorations to enjoy our festivities. All you need is love. Love is all you need!