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).
Leave a Reply