Valentine’s Day Activities Using Hearts

There are so many different classroom activities you can do around Valentine’s Day, from STEM activities to art projects and math activities.

I wasn’t sure how to share more ideas this year than I already have, but I thought for this one I would just share activities of various sorts that involve heart shapes.

For example, this color sorting heart game from Mason Jar of Memories. You can do it with the printables and buckets as shown, or cut hearts out of construction paper and have a larger heart of the same color somewhere in the room so kids have to go to a different place in the room for each color. That makes it a bit of a scavenger hunt to find the hearts and put them in the right place.

Another way to get little ones moving with a Valentine’s theme is playing musical hearts. This idea is from No Time for Flash Cards, and in involves writing different actions on hearts the kids walk on. When the music stops they do what their heart says.

If you scroll down in this post from Mrs. Plemons’ Kindergarten you’ll find another use for big hearts kids can step on: write the letters of the alphabet and do a musical alphabet hearts game, where the child identifies the letter. (You can also use them for an alphabet scavenger hunt, which you’ll also find in this post.)

Or you can put numbers on them and have kids match the number to another heart with that number represented in dots (or hearts, or whatever you want) like in this idea from Active Littles. Kids can also cut out the hearts (or you can do it for them) and use them to help them learn how to count to 20. This one is form Happy Toddler Playtime.

I guess we’re going to need some foam hearts for all these fun heart shaped activities!

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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