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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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