Looking for a way to celebrate Valentine’s Day in your classroom without giving up valuable learning time?

Try some original Valentine’s-themed lesson ideas that get to the heart of your subject matter and ignite the imagination of your students. There are options that can adapted for different grade levels, as well as options for most basic core subjects.

Create Valentines with a curriculum twist

While making valentines may be the most basic of Valentine’s Day activities, that doesn’t mean you can’t put a new twist on a classic.

Challenge your students to be creative, clever and integrate your curriculum into the activity. Choose themes or have students write valentines to/from characters in your readings, a historical figure, a mathematical concept or a scientific idea.

Must Read: Get Valentine Messages To Thrill Your Loved Ones Here Now

Valentine’s Day language arts lessons

Conversation heart candies can be used for all kinds of word and color activities.

If you’re teaching colors, have students sort hearts by color. If you’ve got early readers, have pupilss match pictures related to the messages. You could have small bins with photos of kissing lips (Kiss Me), a phone (Call me), a puppy (Puppy Love), a bride and groom (Marry Me), an angel (Angel), a ladybug (Love Bug). Kids can take turns putting their candies in the proper bins.

There are really endless possibilities. Heart messages can jump start synonym or antonym brain storming, act as sentence starters. You could have a worksheet with columns for nouns, verbs, etc.

If you don’t want to use the actual candy hearts, you can start by having students make them. Older students can amp up the vocab by using SAT words to create their conversation hearts.

Reading & writing love stories, poems, sonnets or songs

Literacy instruction, literary analysis and creative writing all have an outlet for this romantic holiday.

Reading assignments are easy enough to fit the holiday theme. Just choose a text that relates to love. To get creative, you can even use lyrics to popular love songs as your materials to examine word choice, rhythm, rhyme scheme, parts of speech or any other literacy connection.

For creative writing, challenge students to write their own story, poem or song about love. You can help by giving them story starters, brainstorming love-related rhymes as a class or playing love story popcorn as a group (where you start the story and each student adds two sentences).

Valentine Day Pix

Remember, Valentine’s Day can celebrate all forms of love, not just romantic love. Let students know that their love stories don’t have to be about romance, but about anyone or anything they love. If you’re choosing a Valentine’s Day text, books like The Giving Tree can show the importance of give and take in any loving relationship.

In these Gnomeo and Juliet video writing prompts, students will consider the meaning of colors, setting and story, creative wordplay with puns, and adapting stories.

How love plays a role in history

Valentine’s Day can kick off an excellent research or critical thinking activity. No matter what unit you’re teaching, there is certainly a society that includes some form of marriage rituals.

Perhaps your pupils will reveal the role marriage played in the political of 19th century Europe or how minstrel love songs came into favor or how arranged marriages still exist in today’s society.

Biology of the heart & circulatory system

Align your lesson plans on the heart and how it circulates blood and nutrients throughout the body.

Lead a classroom discussion that explores some scientific reasons that people fall in love. As students ask questions and pose potential answers (hypotheses), write them on the board. These will be your research questions for the next step of the experiment activity.

Then, break pupils into groups. Assign each group one of a research question.

Using the Scientific Method, students will describe how they could execute each step of the experiment to see if their hypothesis is correct.

The bulk of their description will deal with the experiment itself. For the experiment stage, they should identify the necessary supplies, method of monitoring and tracking data, independent and dependent variables, etc.

This critical thinking approach will make them think about experiments on a higher level than just executing the steps of a typical experiment assignment.

Source:teachhub.com

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