12th February 2024
Valentine’s Day is an excellent day to celebrate in the classroom because it can extend beyond romantic love. For many children in the classroom, Valentine’s Day can feel stressful in the lead-up, especially for shy children who don’t want to get involved in giving individual cards. The great thing about Valentine’s Day is that you can put together a bunch of activities involving all students, whilst also still allowing room for students to give out individual cards should they wish to do so.
It’s really important to ensure that the activities you pick are age-appropriate for your classroom. Try to keep it simple and also be sensitive to the fact that you have a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in your class, which can make activities such as gift-giving difficult. Instead, focus on things that you can facilitate that are fun and inclusive.
We’ve put together five inclusive ideas you can try out in your classroom today!
Create a kindness jar
It’s cool to be kind! Get all of your students to write on a scrap of paper a kind thing that they would like to say to another student. For example, “I love playing games with you” or “You are really funny”. Keep them statement-based and collect them into a “kindness jar”. You can pick these out and read them to your class throughout the day.
This is a simple and easy activity because it gets students to think positively and also express kind thoughts towards others. If you find that your kindness jar is well-received by your class, then you could keep something like this all year round and have your classmates top it up on a bi-weekly basis.
If your class is slightly older, you can use the kindness jar as a learning opportunity for them. Getting students to demonstrate kindness anonymously takes away the need to impress or get praise from others. Instead, being kind anonymously is a selfless and mature thing to do. It’s a simple but effective way of helping students realise just how important random acts of kindness are!
Candy hearts
On Valentine’s Day, ensure that every student in your class gets a candy heart from you! As a teacher, it’s important to create a safe space for your students and also remind them of how much they’re appreciated at school.
If you’d like, you could even tell them one thing you appreciate about them as you’re giving out the candy hearts one by one! It’s important to instil positivity and affirm to students that you appreciate their presence and their individual personalities. Again, Valentine’s Day can feel like a tough day for some students, so focus on trying to give them an individual moment to feel special.
Finally, ensure that the candy hearts that you pick are able to be eaten by everybody in the class (checking that there’s no gelatin, etc). You could even get two different types of sweets and get your students to pick, depending on what your budget is and how much time you have.
Find the heart!
If the energy is low in your classroom, put together a “find the heart” treasure hunt! Split your class into 4 teams and plant 20 hearts (of differing sizes) in your classroom and then one “magic” heart (in a colour of your choice). The first team to find either all 5 hearts or the 1 magic heart wins! If you can randomly pick your teams, then that’s a great way to encourage students to experience teamwork with their peers outside of their typical friendship groups.
Valentines word search
It’s time to get your students using their brains! Put together a word search filled with all types of words to do with Valentine’s Day. We recommend 10 words and spending about 15-20 minutes doing this! Again, depending on the age group that you teach, ensure that the words aren’t too complex. If you think your class will struggle with 10 words, you can always drop this down to 5 to save time.
What do you like about yourself?
Get children to draw a self-portrait and write underneath (or around the self-portrait) all of the things they like or love about themselves. As much as Valentine’s Day can be about the love you have for someone else, it’s so important to champion self-love and love who we are as individuals. You can then hang these self-portraits up in your classroom and keep them up for the rest of the month. This can be a great afternoon activity and you can make it as extensive as you’d like (for example, using arts and crafts supplies so students can bring their self-portraits to life!).
We hope you feel inspired for Valentine’s Day… for more fun classroom based activities check out our other blog posts here
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