Valentine’s Day symbolizes love, kindness, and friendship, all the positive feelings that every student should get nourished for in schools. Making this day special in school will let your students appreciate the positive vibe in the right way.
To make Valentine’s Day successful at school, this article presents some of the best activities you can organize for students.
1. A tree of kindness
The celebration of love is not possible without celebrating the concept of kindness. At school, teachers need to teach students how to convey positive messages and kindly embrace the qualities of people around them.
To make this happen, you can dedicate Valentine’s Day to a tree of kindness. You can ask students to randomly pick the name of a classmate from a bowl.
Then, each student has to write a small note including all the qualities of that classmate. The coordinating teacher should check every note and praise the best notes.
All the notes go to the tree clipped with the help of pins. The better the praise, the higher it gets a place on the tree.
This activity blends the concept of kindness with healthy competition. Every student tries to find the kindest words to praise a classmate.
This is one of the most beautiful qualities students cultivate via this activity.
2. Friendship Message Bracelets
Friendship is the dearest relationship students come across after their relationships with parents. Celebrating friendship would be a perfect purpose of Valentine’s Day at school.
You can organize and inform about the celebration to students in advance. Ask students to make friendship bracelets with a small message to their friend.
Each student can make as many friendship bands as they like. The messages should revolve around the concept of friendship.
On Valentine’s Day, each student can exchange friendship bracelets and read messages on them. At the end of the day, you can ask every student to pick the favorite bracelet they received.
3. Contest of Door Decoration
You can organize fun and interesting activity of door decoration for your students. Make it a contest and decide prizes for the first 5 best doors. This way, each group of students will have a chance to win something.
The rules of this contest are simple. Each class has to decorate their classroom door collectively. This is a group activity, which embraces the concept of friendship. The best-decorated doors win prizes.
You can also turn this into a classroom decoration contest if there is enough time. End the contest with a Valentine’s Day celebration including pastries, music, and soft drinks.
4. Valentine’s Day Card Contest at School
How about you turn this whole day into a great lesson of arts, crafts, and creativity. Ask every student to indulge in the contest of card creation for Valentine’s Day.
Students need to make sure that their cards look beautiful and it also aligns with the values of Valentine’s Day.
So, before the contest, you can introduce your students with the value of Valentine’s Day. Let them understand the importance of friendship, kindness, and love in life. Using this knowledge, students can create beautiful cards.
At the end of the competition, the cards should be judged with respect to the patterns, designs, colors as well as the message incorporated.
Students can decide whether they want to gift that card to a classmate or want to keep them.
5. Hunt for Valentine’s words
Young students struggle to memorize new vocabulary. But when remembering words become a fun activity, it improves the retention of the knowledge. You can make it happen this Valentine’s Day at your school.
Ask students to find as many words as possible that suit the values of Valentine’s Day. Of course, you will be telling them about the values of this day in advance. Cover the history of Valentine’s Day along with the emotions attached to it. This will diversify the range of words students can search.
This search will include the books only. Students can also think of the words and write them down. However, the catch is that students should be able to spell and pronounce the searched words correctly.
This is a great activity, especially if you teach the English language subject in your school. This activity turns a learning session into a fun activity for students.
6. Embracing Valentine’s Day with poems and romantic songs
If your students are old enough to understand poetry, this activity is can be a great learning experience. You, as a teacher, can pick poems and songs that beautifully align with the concept of friendships, love, and relationships.
Now, the idea is to help students understand these values through the selected songs and poems. For that, you can create an activity, in which, students need to choose their favorite portion of a song or a few lines from a poem.
They need to explain the meaning in their own words. You can also ask questions related to those songs and poems, and students have to write their answers.
Students learn the values of love and affection. At the same time, their comprehension skills and writing abilities improve as well.
7. Crossword of Valentine’s Day
You can collect different images associated with the concept of Valentine’s Day. So, your images can be a heart, balloons, rose, and others. These pictures work as the clues and students need to find and complete the crossword using them.
After every clue, the students who guess the word right need to stand up and spell the word.
This activity improves the creative ability of students and also improves vocabulary. Organizing this activity takes moderate effort. You can easily find a set of images in the market along with crossword sheets.
8. Discuss Worldwide Valentine’s Day celebration
The world has become a small place due to online connectivity. People get introduced to various cultures, even if they don’t visit places. You can also provide an informative, virtual journey of places for your students on Valentine’s Day.
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You and other fellow teachers can search the culture surrounding Valentine’s Day in different countries. Then, discuss the rituals and customs followed in different places.
You can include the reasons why a culture celebrates Valentine’s Day differently. Students become aware of multiple cultures around the world. For example, in Japan, Valentine’s Day is the holiday when only men get gifts. The women get gifts on a different day called the White Day, which comes in March.
There is a lot to understand in terms of various cultures around the world. You can do it with students and help them understand the cultural diversity.
9. Heart Pockets for Valentine’s Days wishes
Another crafting activity involves the creation of heart pockets. This fun activity allows students to make beautifully decorated pockets for Valentine’s Day.
The catch is to make heart-shaped pockets only and still try to make them look as unique as possible.
The pockets are displayed in the classroom and students use the pockets to collect Valentine’s Day cards and gifts from other students.
You can also put every pocket in a display area. Every student can put candies, chocolates, cards or other gifts in the pockets they like. If you organize this, make sure that every pocket is visible as well as accessible to all the students.
10. Roll the Dice and Color the Heart
This activity includes a sheet of multiple white hearts and a dice. Each student gets to have one sheet as well as dice. Also, students need one red sketch pen to color the hearts.
Now, every student has to roll the dice first and count the number appeared. Then, they can color the same number of hearts on their sheet. The student completing his or her sheet first wins the game.
This activity suits best for kids in primary school.
12. Making Structure with a Toothpick and Heart-shaped Marshmallows
A yummy and fun activity for young students. You can provide students with toothpicks and small heart-shaped marshmallows. Then, each student has to use his or her creative ideas to make structures with those props. Students might start eating all the marshmallows, so you need to monitor the whole activity.
This activity triggers problem-solving and creative aspects. Students need to figure out how to balance their structure. Their structures fall down a lot of times, which increases the fun of the activity.
12. Beaded Heart Bracelets for Best Friends
On Valentine’s Day, you can ask every student to make beaded heart bracelets for their best friends. Provide them beads with alphabets written on them.
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Also, provide threads and other required items. Each student can make a bracelet with the name of his or her best friend in the class. Then, students can gift those bracelets to each other. It would be good if you let students do this activity in pairs.
So, which activity seems perfect for your classroom this Valentine’s Day?!