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

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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