Valentine’s Day STEM Activities

Every holiday gives us an opportunity for new twists on STEM activities, and Valentine’s Day is no exception. Whether you want to use candy in your experiments or use other materials, this roundup should get you thinking about fun STEM things you can do for Valentine’s Day in the classroom or at home.

I love this paper hearts structure building challenge from Buggy and Buddy because it’s an engineering challenge that turns into a decoration for the classroom. Print out their template to make paper strips of different sizes to turn into hearts and stack together.

Feel Good Teaching has a fun STEM game for kids to play by filling a heart outline with the shapes of other hearts. Hearts of different sizes have different point values, and the goal is to get the highest point value to fill the space.

If you’re OK with using food in your STEM challenges, there are lots of things you can do with conversation hearts, like build a tower (Math Geek Mama) or a more complex structure (Productive Pete) or try some coding and other engineering challenges (Momgineer). The candy catapult is always a popular option, too (There’s Just One Mommy). Or you can observe what happens to candy in different liquids with this experiment from Curriculum Castle.

Challenge kids to create Valentine’s themed Lego projects with this Valentine brick challenge from 123 Homeschool 4 Me. Or challenge them to a whole bunch of STEM activities with this list of ideas from Little Bins for Little Hands. I love the cup stacking challenge, which is shown here.

I could resist sharing a recipe for Valentine’s slime, of course; this one is from There’s Just One Mommy and uses glitter glue to make it extra sparkly (though you could just add glitter to the recipe if you don’t have glitter glue handy).

Valentine’s Day Game For Kids

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Estimating and Measuring with Candy Hearts

The celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe is important throughout Mexico and other parts of the world. Her feast day is Dec. 12, and the celebrations honoring her appearance to Juan Diego in 1531 begin a few days before that.

Whether you celebrate yourself or just want to share about the celebration at home or in your classroom, Las Mañanitas: The Beautiful Celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a good place to start. The book, by Ernesto Joel Vega Rosales and Jeanette Gonzalez Seneviratne, with illustrations by Dana Sanmar, tells the story of a family’s celebration of the feast day in both English and Spanish.

They prepare with a novena, which is nine days of prayers and preparations. The children, Lucia and Pablo, are given special outfits made by their grandmother that look like what Juan Diego might have worn when he saw Our Lady. The book describes the prayers that are made each day, such as a prayer for respect for life, for families and for the indigenous people of the Americas, to name a few.

As told in the book, Juan Diego was a native Mexican born near modern day Mexico City. His given name was Cuaauhtlatoatzin, which means “He who speaks like an eagle.” When he converted to Christianity his name was changed to Juan Diego, and as he walked to church he passed a hill called Tepeyac. One day he heard the birds singing especially beautifully and a voice called him to go to the top of the hill.

There he saw Our Lady of Guadalupe, who asked him to tell the bishop she wanted a chapel built in her name at the foot of the hill. The bishop asked for a sign that Juan Diego really saw her, and later she had him collect flowers that she blessed and take them to the bishop. When Juan Diego dropped the flowers, an image of Our Lady could be seen on his cloak, which is still on display in her basilica to this day.

The feast day is celebrated as mañanitas, which includes singing, indigenous music and dancing, and children presenting flowers to Our Lady. Juan Diego is remembered today as being humble, brave and faithful, and was the first indigenous American made a saint.

The book is colorful and tells the story in a clear way, and it’s fun to have it both in English and Spanish if you teach Spanish or speak Spanish at home or in the classroom. It’s a great way to learn the basics of the celebration and the story of Juan Diego and why he is still remembered today.

About the book: 40 pages, paperback, published 2024 by Loyola Press. Suggested retail price $14.99.

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Have you read?

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