Kids Craft: Customized Valentine's Day Flags Cards

Valentine Flag Cards

The six year old vexillologist designed a "Friendship Card" for Valentine's day to give to his classmates. He was particular about choosing flags that he considered interesting; he also tried to match up some of his friends with the flags of the countries of their ancestry. With classmates from Armenia, Azores, Serbia, Russia, Germany, Scotland, Sweden and Italy, he had a fabulous time getting the cards ready with me.

At first, he wanted to draw and color the flags, which I whole-heartedly encourage usually. But, considering the time constraints and his flu-like symptoms, I decided to print it. Much like last year when Prehistoric Life was all the rage, which led to unique valentines, this year, it is all about flags and countries.


We did add a kid-friendly joke inside each card with the answer at the bottom. Og picked out a few special jokes and knew which friend would enjoy it the most so he made sure the right flag and the right joke went together to the right recipient.

All that was left to do was stamp some sweet treats and color them in and add some custom drawings to personalize the card with an inside story. The kid enjoyed this process to his heart's content, relating a story about each. For example, he chose to color one of the cards with a jar full of sweets in a jumble of colors claiming that the jar was left out and the candy inside got all sticky and gooey running into each other. In another card, he added a table on which the jar rests (rather than being suspended in mid air), and proceeded to add a few candy on the table and on their way to the table from the jar, explaining that some of the candy from the jar started escaping before the lid was tightened.

Finally, he wrote his name in the "From:" part of each card. He had typed the recipients' name when we were designing the card layout, rather than writing the names by hand. I didn't mind it this time as he did the typing himself to make sure the recipient's name is readable.

Rather than a cutesy finished product that looks all perfectly adorable and cliched, it seemed more appropriate to let the kid decide on what sort of a card to make for Valentine's day. In another year or two, he may not be interested at all, which is fine.

His friends may not even realize the fact that he put in so much thought and effort into creating these unique cards. But, going by his current interest, which is all Flags, flags, and more flags, the cards gave him a sense of ownership and pride in making something special as a token of friendship. And that is all that matters.

Flags of the World and Elements

After a round of learning about Countries of the World, it was a natural organic progression to learning about the Flags of the World.

Smithsonian Handbook: Complete Flags of the World started it all for us. Some activities the kid enjoyed after learning most of the flags of the world:

• Match the countries with the flags - we do 3 to 5 at a time, to not overwhelm
• Given a flag picture, identify the country
• Flag coloring pages - given just the outline and the country name, try to color it in correctly
• Given a flag type, name a country's flag that is of that type. Example,  Serration (Qatar), Fimbriated (Guyana), Triangle (Zimbabwe), Quartered (Martinique) and so on
• Given a country's flag, identify its type as best as possible (Triangle and Fimbriated can be confusing for some)

There are printable activities at Enchanted Learning, some of which were much enjoyed by the younger child. Of course, there are many nice apps that made learning flags fun.

After decades of being blissfully uninterested about flag types, I can finally identify a few common types like Saltaire, Scandinavian Cross, Fimbriated, Quartered, Serrated, Triangle, besides the usual Tricolor, Tribar, Bicolor and Cross. Plus the typical parts of the flag like the Canton and Fly and Charge...

The toughest for me was to draw and color the flag, given a country name. The easiest, of course was to match the countries and flags. I rely on short-term memory to get through these activities, but, after a few months of no reiteration, am sure I'd have to start over from scratch and learn it all again.

Now, a while back, we studied the Periodic Table of Elements.  So when I came across this collation by Jamie Gallagher at Smithsonian.com, it gave us an idea for a wonderful activity to combine two of the kid's interest to make an extension activity with elements and flags.