Easy Valentine’s Day Math Activities

Adding a little Valentine’s Day to the mix makes math games even more fun. Check out these great, easy, printable and free options to use in the classroom, in your math center or at home.

These Valentine’s Day ladybug printables from Preschool Play and Learn help kiddos learn how to count to 20 and recognize the numbers that go with them. Kids can count the number and then clip or mark the numerals that represent that number on the side.

Use dice and the printables from 123 Homeschool 4 Me to recognize numbers from 1 to 12 in a different way. Here kids can roll the dice, count up the number and then cover up the corresponding number on the heart until they have gotten all the numbers.

The Printables Princess has lots of ideas for math and literacy centers for kindergarten that you can purchase, but if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the post there’s a freebie printable for a flip and find sheet that goes up to 100. You have the numbers on cards and the sheet with all the numbers, and kids (or you) can mix the number cards and then use them to find and cover up the numbers on the sheet. For this one you will need 100 of some small object like pompoms or little heart erasers, or if you only want to use it once you can use dot markers.

These Valentine hearts from A Little Pinch of Perfect ask students to pair half of the heart with the number to a half with the same number of hearts on it.

And Stay at Home Educator has printable ten frame cards showing the number, the word for the number and the same number of hearts. Kids can use buttons, pompoms or erasers to cover the hearts as they count, or just count the number and learn what the numeral looks like.

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Fall Math Activities

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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