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

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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