These free printable heart pattern mats are fun fine motor activity for young children.
Use these heart fine motor mats with loose parts, playdough, dot markers, or pencils to work on lots of important fine motor and pre-writing skills in a hands-on and fun way.
These print and go, pattern mats are a great Valentine’s Day fine motor activity for kids, or a fun way to work on those small muscle skills any time!
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If you are celebrating Valentine’s day, or just looking for a fun fine motor activity, these heart pattern tracing printables (scroll to the end of the post to get the printables) can be used in so many fun and creative ways for lots of hands on learning and pre-writing skill development.
These heart pattern tracing mats are a fun and easy fine motor activity for Valentine’s Day, and they also make a great quick and easy activity that is perfect for any time of year. They encourage kids to work on fine motor skills in a fun and creative way.
You can easily include lots of math learning with these heart tracing printables, such as patterns and counting, or just use them to spark your child’s creativity and make some heart art!
There are so many fun and easy ways to use these heart pattern mats to practice fine motor skills. We’ve shared some of our favourite ideas for using these pattern mats below, but I’m sure you can come up with lots more!
However you use these heart pattern mats, your kids will love being creative and building their fine motor skills while they play.
If your kids love this fun fine motor activity, you might like to try one of these easy activities to practice fine motor skills.
Heart Pattern Mats and Loose Parts
Decorate these hearts with some loose parts!
Loose parts play is an easy and creative way to work on fine motor skills, plus it’s lots of fun! Simply collect a variety of loose parts to place on the pattern lines, or use the blank heart template and decorate it any way you like.
We used wooden shapes, beads, pom poms, mini craft sticks, straws, sequins and more to decorate the hearts with loose parts.
Heart Fine Motor Pattern Mats and Playdough
These heart pattern mats also make great playdough mats!
Grab playdough, or make a fresh batch of our easy microwave playdough recipe, and use the dough to follow the patterns on the heart tracing mats.
Making balls and rolling long sausages of dough to follow the lines of the patterns is a great workout for the small muscles in a child’s hands, building control and skills for later writing.
Combining playdough and loose parts with these heart pattern mats is a fabulous way to set up a Valentine’s fine motor activity!
If your kids love playdough check out our free printable Valentine’s Day playdough mats.
Heart Fine Motor Mats and Markers.
Using pencils, markers or highlighters and tracing along the lines of each heart is a great way to practice pre-writing skills. Once you have traced all the lines you could colour them in too.
You could also put the pages into a plastic pocket and use a dry erase marker so you can trace them again and again.
Dot markers are another great idea to use with these heart pattern mats. Dot along each pattern line, or fill the in-between spaces with dots.
More Ideas for Using the Heart Pattern Mats.
There are so many fun ways to use these Valentine’s Day heart pattern mats to work on fine motor skills!
You could collect some natural materials such as leaves, flowers, sticks, grass, seed pods, gum nuts etc. to add to your loose parts to decorate the hearts.
Use cotton buds (q-tips) and try some cotton bud painting along the lines to really give those small hand muscles a workout.
You can also use these pattern mats to work on scissor skills by cutting along the dotted lines. For beginners with scissors it will be helpful to cut out the tree first and offer the easiest patterns to cut.
Or grab some jumbo tweezers to add an extra fine motor challenge.
You can use the heart pattern mats as an art activity.
Collect some collage materials and a glue stick and have fun sticking items along the lines.
You could try some crayon resist painting with the heart pattern mats, or use oil pastel paint, or just some good old water colour paints to follow the patterns and add colour to the hearts.
Or add some extra math learning by using counters or loose parts and dice or number cards with the heart pattern mats. Roll a dice or draw a card and count out that number of items to add to the pattern mats, or start a repeating pattern and get your child to complete it following the lines.
There are so many great ways to use these heart pattern mats for fun and educational activities.
Download the Free Printable Heart Pattern Mats
There are ten different patterned hearts in this set, plus one blank heart so you can make your own designs if you wish.
These free printable pattern mats are ready to print and use, no other preparation required.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. It will fit to print on US ‘letter sized’ paper, just be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options to allow for printer margins.
Click here to download the heart pattern mats.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
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