Valentine’s Day Language Activities

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.

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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