Valentine’s Day Language Activities

January 27, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Valentine’s Day is a good time to get kids thinking about expressing their appreciation for other people, and lots of language arts activities this time of year center on that. For younger kids, using heart shapes to reinforce basic concepts adds a lot of fun. Here are a bunch of Valentine’s Day language activities for kids of a range of ages.

Kids learning their sight words will enjoy these color by sight word coloring pages by 123 Homeschool 4 Me. Liz’s Early Learning Spot has a downloadable sight word board game with a heart theme.

Or you can make your sight words appear by magic by writing them in white crayon on this printable from Playdough to Plato and having the kids uncover and read the word (using marker or watercolor paint).

Teach Beside Me used paper hearts to teach about homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, and this is an easy one you can do yourself without any printables (unless you need a template for the heart shape). You could make this one into a scavenger hunt by hiding words around the room and then having kids match up the correct hearts.

Rhyming words are always fun for little kids, and this printable from Only Passionate Curiosity lets kids play with rhyming words in heart shapes. Here again you could sprinkle the words around the room and have kids collect ones that rhyme (the printable pack includes envelopes they can use to gather their rhymes in).

The jar of gratitude from Inspired Elementary is great to do as a classroom, or each child can fill their own jar with things they love and are thankful for.

Composition Classroom has a fun Valentine’s Day limerick/Mad Libs style poem printable that’s great for upper elementary and middle school kids. It’s a free download on Teachers Pay Teachers.

And this sweet printable from What Have I Learned Teaching gets kids to reflect on things they like about themselves.

Next Plan Idea:

Teacher Appreciation Themes for Your School

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Sun Activities for Kids

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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