Holidays
January 26, 2022 No Comments
If you’ve been a teacher on Valentine’s Day, you know what the energy is like! I’m all for embracing it and finding ways to bring Valentine’s Day into the lesson plans. But if your district is like mine, you may need rigorous activities that aren’t just fluff. So today, I’m sharing some of my favorite Valentine’s Day activities for upper elementary students that are fun but still hit the standards and skills you need to teach.
Valentine’s Day Reading Activities
These 4th grade Valentine’s reading comprehension passages are so much fun! This pack includes a fictional story, a nonfiction article, and a functional text. And each passage has standards-based comprehension questions.
These no-prep worksheets work perfectly for reviewing skills like main idea, summarizing, inferencing, sequencing, cause and effect, fact and opinion, text features, and more.
You can use these in your reading groups or with the whole class for a passage-a-week activity all month long. If you’re short on time to use them in class, they also work well for homework.
And of course, there are tons of great picture books and chapter books for Valentine’s Day. They don’t have to be about love, either! Kindness, friendship, and community are all good themes for February. You can easily do some interactive, skill-based read-alouds or use books as mentor texts in your reading or writing workshop.
Word Analysis Strategies Practice
You know I can’t let a holiday pass by without incorporating some word analysis skills practice! I created this Valentine’s-themed activity for busy 4th and 5th teachers who need quick, targeted review of vocabulary skills like context clues, synonyms, antonyms, prefixes, affixes, hom*ophones, figurative language, and more.
You can use the printable worksheets or the self-grading digital version in Google Forms™. Whichever you use, your students are sure to get a kick out of these questions while also improving their vocabulary!
Valentine’s Day Writing Activity
Even as adults, it still feels good to receive a Valentine’s Day card, am I right? These digital Valentine’s cards are perfect for students to complete and send to another student or to a staff member at your school.
I love that they’re glitter-free and less time-consuming than creating paper cards.
Plus, students get to practice writing a friendly letter, typing, and using Google Slides™ all in one activity! You can even require them to write a paragraph with a topic sentence and details.
Valentine’s Day Activities for Math Workshop
Who doesn’t love a chance to color? These color-by-number worksheets are a fun way for kids to review fractions all February long! Each worksheet targets one skill: simplifying fractions, determining equivalent fractions, or adding and subtracting fractions. These are great for morning work and math rotations.
Two-step word problems are another important area to spiral back to in February. I love these Valentine’s Day multistep word problem task cards for a game of Scoot, a partner activity, or an early finisher option.
Science and Social Studies Activities
The fun doesn’t have to stop with ELA and math!
For science, I love hands-on Valentine’s Day activities like experimenting with candy hearts. They can add different substances to investigate what makes them dissolve or create mixtures and solutions. They can also use candy to build towers, bridges, and other structures for an easy STEM lesson. Another fun hands-on activity is to dissect flowers and review their parts and functions.
For a little bit of Valentine’s-related history, students can research the holiday’s origins, symbols, and traditions. They can also compare Valentine’s customs from around the world. And you can even work in economics (think goods, services, consumers, products, and industries).
In my Valentine’s reading passages, I’ve included a nonfiction article about the history of Valentine’s cards. It’s a high-interest topic and an easy way to combine reading comprehension with social studies!
Ready for Valentine’s Day?
Staying on pace with the curriculum can get tricky in the winter. I hope this post gave you some ideas of how to incorporate Valentine’s Day activities into your lesson plans without feeling like you lost a day of instruction. If you want to save time, you can find all of these activities in my TpT shop. Let me know what other standards-based activities you like to use with your students on Valentine’s Day!
