Happy Valentine's Day!! I hope everyone lived through the sugar and chaos every class party seems to bring!
This year my team has been sending home monthly "home projects" to have the students work on with their families. We have found this to be important because many of our students do not recieve homework so we wanted to make sure they still sat down at least once each month to work on something with their parents. This gives them a chance to show off how hard they have been working on those fine motor skills!
This month we had the kids make Valentine Boxes. I used this great letter from Jennifer at Empowering Little Learners which cut down on the prep time on my end (what teacher doesn't love that?!).
I was so pleased with a lot of our boxes and the kids were super excited to share what they made.
Here are some pictures of their creations:
Here are several of our boxes.
This student had the cutest dog house box complete with a life-size replica of his best friend (his dog Sky).
Here is a great box for a LaLaLoopsy Lover!
This is an adorable hugging monster box.
Complete with handy trap door (This student was ecstatic about this feature)!
I never used to make a big production of Valentine's Day in my classroom. We always focused on Feelings and made Valentine's Day more of a secondary theme. However, then I found this super cute book from the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond and now we do a whole unit on Happy Valentine's Day, Mouse!
This super cute book is great for talking about Valentine's Day but it is extra awesome for talking about friendship and why we love our friends because in the story Mouse makes different valentine cards for each of his friends based on what he loves about them.
...and this sentence-building board which can be printed and used right away or made into an interactive velcro board.
Grab this unit here by clicking the image below:
To go with this theme, last year I had the idea to have the kids go around and say something they loved about each of their classmates. At first, I thought this may be a little difficult for some of my kids with poor verbal skills to do but in the end I was very touched with their thoughtfulness! It was a great activity to take a break to show our appreciation for our friends and at the same time it really made each student feel good about themselves. What is a better lesson than that?!
For this activity, I write the student's name on the line and then fill in each heart with something kind a classmate shares like in the example below.
Valentine's Day BINGO: An easy way to work on vocabulary, joint attention, and matching.
Valentine Delivery Game Board: Another fun way to practice a variety of skills! This game is open-ended so that you can use any flashcards you want such as vocabulary, spelling words, sight words, math facts, and more!
Milkshakes Visual Recipe: Who doesn't love a good milkshake?! My favorite memory of this recipe was using the blender with an adapted switch so all of my students could participate in blending their own milkshake.
Valentine Letters: Another way we spread the Valentine's Day love was these cute letters where every student could write a valentine to each of their classmates. I loved seeing everyone's faces light up when they saw the nice things their friends had to say about them.
Clifford's First Valentines Day Story Board: Another fun Valentine's Day story is Clifford's First Valentine's Day by Norman Bridwell. This story board is divided into categories by wh-question word (who-what doing-what-where). Students can use it to make sentences from top to bottom (who is doing what where) or answer comprehension questions.
Candy Heart Graphing: There never seems to be any shortage of candy hearts in the classroom this time of year. We have fun each year sorting and graphing our hearts before eating them of course!
Love them both? Now you can BUNDLE AND SAVE by clicking the image below to get my Valentine's Day Bundle!
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