3 classroom valentines that aren’t candy

This post has been created in collaboration with Minted, who gifted me this product. This post also contains affiliate links, which if you click on and make a purchase from, I will receive a small commision.

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow! Are you guys ready? I thought I would continue the Valentine’s holiday theme over here by sharing our personalized Valentines that don’t involve ANY CANDY. I set this up for my kiddos after school the other day, and we all worked together to put assemble the Valentines for their classmates.

Confession time: this is the kind of mom I am. Bright, character-themed Valentines make me cringe. I love homemade ones, but honestly, I don’t have the time for that! [Because we all know it’s moms who end up actually making these things.] As a lover of all things good design, I knew there had to be more out there. I’ve ordered these adorable personalized Valentine’s from Minted in the past, and now that this year we have THREE classrooms to pass out Valentines to, I knew that I needed to do this again, to make my life a little easier.

Minted has so many cute classroom Valentines styles and you can personalize with your kids’ names and stickers too! Which means less writing/filling in the blanks for moms [of kids who aren’t quite writing yet]. It’s a bit late to order classroom Valentines for this year, but if you want to order something to send in the mail for friends and family, Minted also makes beautiful full-sized Valentine Photo Cards, for just that reason!

Another thing about the kind of mom I am: I’m just a little tired of holiday after holiday and birthday after birthday loaded with sugar for our kids. I know I’m not the only one! I recently read that Americans today eat an average of 765 grams of sugar every five days.  That is in comparison to the 45 grams of sugar Americans used to eat in 1822 over the same five day period. Isn’t that INSANE? There are so many reasons why this is. It can honestly make you crazy once you start to learn about all the places sugar is hidden in our food! Even snacks labeled as “healthy.” But I won’t get into all that here. The point being, I feel like I can do my own small part by eliminating at least one candy item in our classes’ kid’s Valentines boxes this year.

So this year, as soon as Target put out their Valentine’s stuff, I took my kids there and let them pick out their own “treats” to share with their classmates. The only rule being – it had to be a non-food item. In addition to the sugar factor, there are so many kids in their classes who have allergies. It just makes sense to me to share non-food items. My 7-year-old chose little heart shaped slime, my daughter chose bubbles, and my little man chose the tiny trucks. Each of their choices suited them perfectly!

After we had their picks for what they each wanted to hand out to their friends, I headed over to the Minted website to check out this year’s classroom Valentines designs. Since we already had the treats, I looked for themes that both fit their personalities, and the items they picked. And there were SO many good ones to choose from!

For my daughter, I thought mermaids [her fave] went perfectly with the bubbles she picked!

We used different fun washi tapes to hold the prices to the outside of the cards. My kid’s teachers asked that we didn’t write names on each card [to save time when they are passing them out, especially for my littlests that don’t ready yet] and instead just write “to: my friend”. Makes it easier for me too, so I’m totally a fan of this!

I’m so glad I made this a project we could do together this year, instead of my usual staying up super late the night before Valentine’s Day routine I do most years, haha. It was fun to get them involved and create something a bit unique and so personally THEM.

What do you do for your kids’ classroom Valentines? I’m always curious to see what people do, and get new ideas!