Valentine's Ideas
Offer young students Valentine's ideas that encourage exploration, problem solving and creativity.
Open ended Valentine's ideas involve children at a wide range of developmental levels and provide busy teachers more time to observe the students and note areas where individual or small group instruction will be beneficial.
The children are less frustrated working at their own level as they do not have to compare what they create to fifteen identical items, they are able to challenge themselves and practice implementing prior knowledge and skills.
Open ended valentine's ideas - Cards
- Let students create their own cards.
- Ask a parent helper to cut quantities of small, medium and large hearts in pink, purple and red.
- Supply glue sticks, tape, bits of red ribbon, glittery scraps and Valentine's Day and other gummed shape stickers.
- For best effects, limit the colors of felt markers the children use. This avoids a lovely card being covered in black marker lines!
- Show butterfly heart cards, flower heart cards, dog and cat heart cards, like the samples shown.
- Keep samples on chart paper that also contains illustrated postings of Valentine words, to, from, Mummy, Daddy, and I love you. Reuse this every year as it is a great time-saver.
Demonstrate making cards with cut out hearts and then let the children create freely. Let them know they can copy the samples or create any other card they like. If the kids prefer to glue their card to a folded paper background, like the cat card, they may, but it is not necessary.
I am always impressed by the creativity of young children who take what you show them, then confidently create original items using similar techniques.
Math Valentine's Ideas
Graph Hearts Bulletin Board
- Children choose one creation to add to a graph.
- The children count the number of hearts they used to make their Valentines.
- Children stick that number of heart shaped Post It Notes™ to the graph .
- This makes a cheerful bulletin board display.
More Math Valentine's ideas
Measurement:
- Cut out or photocopy two valentines per child, one about 6 inches across, one about 3 inches across.
- Child lines up one inch blocks across the widest part of each heart counting as they do so.
- Child records on each heart how many blocks it took make the line of blocks across the heart.
- Vocabulary - widest, narrowest.
Area:
- Child turns the hearts over and places one inch blocks on to them until both heart surfaces are covered.
- Child counts and records how many blocks it took to cover each heart.
Number & Operations:
- Cut out 3 or 4 sets of different colored hearts.
- Randomly give children one heart and have them take turns placing them in the pocket chart.
- After about ten kids have a turn, count in a group, how many red hearts, how many blue hearts, how many pink hearts.
- Have the rest of the children place their hearts in the pocket chart and count again.
- Use the same hearts and place 3 red hearts and 2 pinks in one row of the pocket chart. Say, "3 red hearts and 2 pink hearts equal how many all together?" Use different variations of addition and subtraction.
- Optional: Place numbers cards and symbol cards for "+, -, =" under the hearts in the row beneath.
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