Sara Gillingham is back with another beautiful and encouraging book for little readers. This sweet book tells you how to mend a heart but don’t let the hearts fool you, this is not a Valentine’s Day book but one you can enjoy all year.

“To mend a heart, you need gentle hands, the right tools, and lots of patches.”

Follow a little boy as his stuffed elephant falls apart, and he finds ways to repair it. Once repaired, it doesn’t stay that way, and he must keep finding ways to fix it. Although we would love to protect our little ones from heartbreak, we know in life this is not possible. The best thing we can do is equip them with the right tools, to handle heartache and move on. I am the biggest fan of children’s books. Children are able to understand complicated emotions.

It is much better to show them real emotions and how we deal with them, rather to show them books where there are never any problems and everyone is happy all the time. Raising well adjusted children, will happen when we deal with real life issues. Luckily we have gentle, sweet books like How To Mend A Heart to guide our children through.

Sara Gillingham is an amazing author, illustrator and person. You can find more of her books here , they are always encouraging, lovely and empowering for children.

With Valentines day just around the corner, we used Sara’s book as inspiration for a little paper heart garland.

Tools Needed:

Water color paper

Hole Punch

Scissors

Oil pastels

Water color

Ribbon

I pre-cut the shape of a heart and let my son trace it onto water color with oil pastels. Once he was done, we looked at the pages of the book and talked about the different patterns on the hearts. Once he had traced them, and designed them with the oil pastel, he used the water color to paint over the whole heart. Oil and water resist each other, so the water pulls away from the oil and you can see the nice drawing through the paint.

Once the hearts were dry, we cut them, and used a hole punch to make the holes on each side of the hearts for threading through the garland.

It is a fun little read and make, and fun way to enjoy Valentines day together.