Valentines with an Organizational Twist

This year, my daughter’s preschool class valentines were inspired by my own organizational challenge. We have buckets full of pencils. Some we bought ourselves but a large number were received as gifts for trick-or-treating or other holidays. Pencils are a pretty common gift for children and much needed. We use pencils all the time in our homeschool efforts and it seems we can never have too many.

The only problem with all these pencils? It was getting extremely frustrating reaching into the pencil bucket only to pull out an unsharpened pencil or one where the lead had broken. Also, a lot of our pencils have terrible erasers. They just smudge around the lead or leave an orange mess on the paper. The ones with decent erasers get used up quickly and pretty soon they become problems because of a lack of eraser.

One day I had enough with all these unsharpened pencils and went in search of a portable pencil sharpener. Coincidentally, I was looking through the Oriental Trading Company catalog and found my solution!

It was a chocolate-bar shaped case that contained both a pencil sharpener and an eraser! Perfect!

We ordered up a bunch along with some heart-shaped doilies.

After a little fiddling around with some WordArt options in Microsoft Word . . .

I came up with a heart-shaped template.

A little scissoring and a few stitches with some yarn later, we had some adorable homemade valentines.

Our valentines showed our love and helped our friends get a little more organized too.

Did you send or receive any clever valentines today? Please share in the comments.