Cool Hearts

What You Need:

• Paper 
• Crayons

What You Do:

1. Encourage your young artist to choose the colors she wants to use to create her masterpiece. She can include traditional Valentine’s Day colors like reds and pinks, but she'll get the best results if she throws in some other contrasting colors such as purple and yellow.
2. Once she has chosen four or five different colors, she should draw three or four hearts of various sizes on her paper. Tell her to be sure to make each heart a different color.
3. Now it's time to start expanding the hearts. Have her pick one heart and use a different color to create a zig-zaggy band all the way around this heart.
4. Tell her to pick out a different color and begin surrounding the next heart.
5. She should continue, picking out different colors and the second band around each heart and then go on to bands three, four and five.
6. As she expands her hearts, they'll eventually bump into each other and look like they're overlapping.
7. Continue coloring band after band until the entire page has been filled.

Expand on this activity by experimenting with different looks. How does the picture change when you change the number of hearts or the placement of the hearts? What effect will you get if every heart begins with the same color and that color is exclusively used for band 1, band 2, band 3, and so on?