I love you more book: Pop up string of hearts card

Happy Valentine's day!

On the wonderful day of spreading and sharing love, I would love to share the details of the book we read for Valentine's day - I Love You More by Laura Duksta and Illustrated by Karen Keesler

Book:

I love you more by Laura Duksta



I came to you know about the wonderful book from readysetread2me blog. I got the book from the library to read it to my daughter for Valentine's day. Not only for Valentine day, The Book can be read anytime of the year.

I feel glad that we got the book from the library, May be we will buy a copy of it too. It's not a story but a conversation between a mother and her son.

The boy asks his mom how much she loves him, and she proceeds to tell him how she loves him more than everything.

Then, the boys says, “I love you more.” The book continues... It's a flip side book, can be read from front to back or back to front as love never ends. The mom asks the boy how much he loves her, and the story repeats from his point of view. Then the mom says, “I love you more.”

CJ loved the book. Because it's a question she often asks me "Mommy, How much do you love me?" she spreads out her hand and asks this much, this much! and I always say "I love you more than anything in this world"

Sometimes CJ says, "Mommy I love you 100 times"... 100 is the biggest number for her:-)

We enjoyed each and every page of the book, while the mother compares her feelings of love to mighty wind, bright star, pretty flower, full moon... the boy's comparisons are longest lollipop, biggest bubble, loudest rocket, freest kite...

Some of my favorite phrases from the book

Mommy -

"I love you taller than the tallest tree ever grew", "I love you mightier than the mightiest wind ever blew", "I love you fuller than the fullest moon you ever knew"

Son -

"I love you taller than the tallest giraffe ever grown", "I love you longer than the longest lollipop lasted", "I love you higher than the highest swing ever swung"

The Illustrations are beautiful. Especially I love the cover pages. In the front side, the mother faces the reader and on the other side, the kid faces the reader. When the author says the feeling of love, you can feel it from the illustration.

My love for the book increased more when I read the biography of the author and watched the videos of her talk on the book. Inspiring person! Do check her website

Craft:

We made a pop up string of hearts card for Daddy! More than the craft, we had good time phrasing our own phrases like "taller than tallest building ever built", "prettier than the prettiest rainbow ever seen"


On each heart, CJ wrote how much she loves her dad by writing single words, brightest sun, pretty flower, pretty rainbow..

Materials Used:

Construction paper
Child Safe scissors
Cookie cutter(optional)
Stickers(optional)
Markers

Steps Overview:

I got the string of hearts idea from the FamilyFun magazine website

To make String of hearts

1. Cut out a strip of paper(approx 18 by 4 inches) and fold, accordion style, in equal section size(3 inches).
   
2. On the top layer, draw a heart, either by hand or by tracing around a cookie cutter. Just as paper doll chain, the sides of the heart should extend out to the folded edges.
   
   
3. Cut through all the layers of paper except where the sides touch the fold.
   
4. Spread out the string of hearts
   
   Cj was pretty excited to see the string of hearts!
   

To make the Card

Front cover


Middle


Fold a construction paper in half and cut to get 9 by 6 inches paper. Fold in middle to get a card


Unfold the card and on the inside of the card, Glue the first heart from the string on one half and last heart on the other half as shown below



Gently fold the card back, folding the hearts. Decorate/Write your message on top of the card. Cj wanted to write I love you daddy. So she wrote that and drew a family of trees.




I was thinking, we will put stickers on each heart but CJ wanted to put the stickers on the card and write on the heart. With spelling help she wrote the words on the hearts. Since the hearts were small, we just wrote the key words and CJ read it to her dad like "I love you prettier than the prettiest flower".


Daddy loved the way the hearts popped when he opened the card.

The card can be made for Valentine's day or for Father's day, Mother's day, Grandparents birthday.