Celebrating Valentine’s Day in the classroom can be fun and simple. Valentine’s Day is a holiday that lends itself to the themes of friendship and kindness.
Complement Hearts
A simple way to bring some of the love into your classroom is to have your students create complement hearts for their classmates. For this activity have each student write their name at the top of a blank paper and leave it on their desk. Students will take turns moving around the room to write a unique complement for each classmate. You could tie it into the curriculum. For example, if you are learning about adjectives each student could use a kind adjective to describe their classmate. After this step collect the papers and review the responses.
If you have access to a computer lab your students can go to https://wordart.com/create and choose a heart shape then type their classmate responses into the word column. Be creative! Then print out the final designs, cut out the hearts, and put them on display for a quick and easy bulletin board that is perfect for February!
Celebrating Valentine’s Day with Letters of Kindness
February is the month of kindness. Focus on being kind by writing kind letters to classmates. These letters can be tied to the curriculum by focusing on friendly letter writing skills. The teacher can assign students in pairs to write letters to each other. The focus of the letter can be as simple as what makes the person special or unique.
Random Acts of Kindness
Bring the kindness school-wide by having your class complete random acts of kindness in the school community. Create a bulletin board with acts of kindness that your class can complete as they go about their day. You can have your students brainstorm additional ideas to add to the list.
Standards Based Valentine’s Themed Work
The easiest way to incorporate Valentine’s Day into the classroom is to keep it standards-based and in line with what you do from day to day. There are tons of great-themed units and lessons that are premade on TpT including two activities that are in my store. First is February reading comprehension passages. These are short fiction and nonfiction passages themed for the month of February and include vocabulary and comprehension questions. Check out this resource up close by clicking here.
The second resource is a February activities packet. There are 40 pages of standards-based February-themed activities for your students. Click here to check out this resource up close.
Valentine’s Day Themed Books
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Read aloud or put some Valentine-themed books on display in your classroom library. Here are a few of my favorites:
A Crankenstein ValentineSamantha Berger’s Valentine-themed installment of our beloved Crankenstein is a definite crowd-pleaser. Our inner grumps sympathize with Crankenstein as he navigates the day of love.
Roses Are Pink, Your Feet Really Stink (Gilbert the Opossum)This is a great book to start a discussion on what it means to be kind. Gilbert has to write a Valentine to the kids in his class which is tricky because not everyone is nice to him. Read along as he navigates the right thing to do.
The Biggest Valentine EverClayton and Desmond are working together to create a Valentine for their teacher but things go south when they can’t agree on things. Will they come to realize they make a great team?
Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch (paperback)Mr. Hatch is lonely. One day he receives a mysterious package from a secret admirer and his life is changed.
Celebrating Valentine’s Day in the classroom can be fun and doesn’t have to be complicated. These simple ideas will keep you moving through your regularly scheduled curriculum while still allowing you and your students to have fun and celebrate.