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

I’m in deep denial about the fact that new year is almost upon us again! It’s been the fastest and the longest year at the same time, and I can look back and see some good things as well as some things I wish had gone differently.

Doing a year in review with your kids — whether in the classroom or at home — is a good way to capture some of their memories and the things they really liked about the year gone by.

There are a lot of different printable year in review worksheets you can use if you want to make this super easy. Here are links to a few (often part of larger posts about NYE celebrations with kids that are worth a read, too):

Teach Beside Me has lots of fun printables fro the end of the year, including a year in review that covers favorite memory, funniest memory and the best book they read, among other topics.
NurtureStore‘s version has space for a self-portrait and prompts like favorite toy, best day out this year and future dream job.
Remember favorites, their “best idea” of the year and have room for setting goals for next year with this one from The Keele Deal.
The year in review from Yes We Made This has room for drawing or writing and includes things like something they learned, a memory they made and a place they visited.

Of course you could pretty easily make your own year in review for the whole family to do that asks questions based on what you most want to remember. (Favorite video game? Best friend? Favorite family memory?)

And if after the year in review you’re ready to look ahead a bit, Mrs. Merry has new year’s resolution printables to inspired kids to look ahead and set goals for things they want to try. You can totally fill this one out as a grownup, too.

[Photo: Mrs. Merry]

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