February 24th is National Wear Red Day. This day, organised by the British Heart Foundation, is to raise awareness of heart disease. So, it’s a great opportunity to teach children what foods to eat to keep their hearts healthy and prevent heart disease later in life. Obviously, all the children should be encouraged to wear something red and you could also paint their little faces with our Bright Red Face Paint as a start to the day.

Red Food Fun

Keeping with the red theme, it’d be nice to create some healthy red food and, it just happens to be pancake day on February 21st, so why not make tasty wholewheat pancakes, filling them with the obvious red fruit choices of raspberries, cherries, red grapes or strawberries. Or use the same berries, add some banana and a handful of spinach (honestly – they’ll never notice it), top up with water or soy milk and blend into smoothies. There are more guidelines for healthy food for kids on the BHF’s website.

Red Heart Themed Crafts

Heart butterflies are a great way to mark the day and brighten the classroom. You’ll need the following:

heavyweight card

coloured lolly sticks or plain

bright red card

acrylic jewels

pink crepe paper

red metallic foil paper

red cellophane

wobbly eyes

glitter dots

small pom poms

heart paper punch

glitter

pipe cleaners either glitter, standard or chenille

red felt-tip marker

pink wax crayon

colouring pencils

glue

Blu Tack

scissors

What to do:

make several different heart shaped templates for the children from heavyweight white card. Try to make them so to that they are all the same shape, but different sizes so that they fit inside one another

give each child two pieces of red card and get them to trace around the largest heart shape on each piece of card with either a red felt-tip marker, a pink or red wax crayon or pink or red colouring pencil

cut the hearts out

now get the children to trim the points off the hearts

lay the two hearts down so that the bottoms slightly overlap one another and glue together – this is going to be the butterfly’s wings

once dry, glue to the lolly stick and leave to dry again

glue wobbly eyes to the lolly stick

next, cut two pieces of pipe cleaner about five centimetres long

glue these to the top of the lolly stick to form antennae

take two small pom poms and glue to the ends of the pipe cleaners

now it’s time to decorate!

glue smaller hearts made from different types of paper, such as cellophane, crepe, foil onto the wings

add glitter, acrylic jewels, punched out hearts, pom poms, glitter dots

once finished, leave to dry and then attach to walls and doors with Blu Tack

Photos

Don’t forget to take photos of creative class projects for the children’s scrap books and you can also send them to the BHF’s website for inclusion in their gallery.