“The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”- Blaise Pascal
People around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day! It’s a holiday that inspires our learners to let friends, family members, and loved ones know how much they care about them by sending cute cards and sweets. However, you can also inspire students to learn grammar, math, geography, science, and more with the 14 Valentine’s Day inspired activities below. I’ve also included a global project for learners to connect with peers worldwide and learn about their culture. Connecting students with peers worldwide is one of the missions in my new book, Hacking Digital Learning Strategies: 10 Ways to Launch EdTech Missions. Check out the slides from my recent webinar, Valentine’s Day Activities Students of All Ages Will Love! (Download as a pdf).
Get your copy of Hacking Digital Learning, The 30 Goals Challenge, or Learning to Go. Ask me about training your teachers, ShellyTerrell@gmail.com!
14 Valentine’s Day Inspired Activities
- Students can send free digital greetings to their loved ones, peers, another class, nursing homes, cancer wards, orphanages, or the military with Buncee, Chatterpix Kids app, Ink Cards, Animoto, Canva, Magisto, Pic-Collage, 123Greetings, or Red Stamp. First, allow them to create their messages or poems on paper and have their peers edit for grammar errors. Students can add drawings or photos to many of these web tools and apps.
- Get your students to send their digital greetings to students worldwide by joining the Virtual Valentines global project. Your students can just send their Valentines or also Skype with the other class.
- If you’d teach math then your students can send Math-o-grams with cool heart designs graphed. Students can see the equation worked out.
- Add fun science learning to Valentine’s Day greetings by getting students to write their messages in invisible ink.
- Students can learn cryptology by turning their Valentine’s Day message into a coded message or rebus for peers to decypher. Try MyRebus where students create quick virtual rebus messages to email. If you have more time then use this lesson plan to get students to create their own secret coded language.
- Very young learners will enjoy learning words, spelling, and phonics by creating digital greetings on Starfall to send to fun characters.
- For some grammar and fun try playing the Valentine’s Day inspired M.A.S.H game on iOS and Android.
- Students can create love poems with the free digital Love Magnetic Poetry Kit.
- Students can learn about concrete poetry here (shape poetry) and create their own heart shaped poem using the Neoformix Word Hearts generator.
- Use Tagxedo to create Valentine’s Day inspired word clouds with adjectives to describe their loved ones. Tagxedo lets you create word clouds in the shape of hearts or with the profile of the person.
- Use candy hearts as writing prompts.
- Students choose 3 to 5 and include the words in a poem or story.
- Another idea is to break students into pairs, they choose 3 to 5 candy hearts, and then they write a dialogue or text message conversation including the words. They can try this free sms chat generator created by Class Tools!
- Instead of eating the candy hearts, you can instruct your elementary students to save them to learn science with this candy hearts experiment.
- Candy and sweets are especially popular during Valentine’s Day, which makes it a perfect time to learn math and science by making candy. Find several recipes that I’ve bookmarked here.
- I’ve created this free writing activity for students in which they work in pairs to create a recipe for a love potion. After the pairs write down the ingredients, they can learn math and science with these recipes for making a fizzy potion they can drink.
Challenge: Try one of these activities with your students! Post more ideas in the comments below.
