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Valentine’s Day is such a fun holiday in kindergarten! It’s a great time to discuss friendship, family, and working together. There are also so many fun Valentine’s Day stories to read and games to play. In fact, I’ve found that it’s too much to squeeze into a one-day celebration! In this post, I’m going to share a full week of math and literacy activities that you can use for a Valentine’s Day unit for kindergarten.
Valentine’s Day in kindergarten is fun because it’s a great time to focus on friendship. As a class, you can discuss the qualities of a good friend and add them to an anchor chart. Students can then fill out a graphic organizer to outline the qualities of a friend.
After students have had a chance to learn all about friends, they can use their ideas to write thoughtful letters and Valentines to their friends! If you would like students to focus on writing to their classmates, you can have students choose a name card to ensure that students don’t get left out.
A fun book to read with students during the week of Valentine’s Day is “The Biggest Valentine Ever” by Steven Kroll. This story has a sweet message of overcoming disagreements and the benefits of working together.
After reading about the two friends in the story, students can complete a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the characters.
Your students can also replicate the biggest valentine ever! As they complete the heart-shaped mouse craft, students will practice following directions with comparison words like biggest and smallest.
Another engaging read-aloud during a Valentine’s unit is “Froggy’s First Kiss” by Jonathan London. This is a great story for making predictions and discussing results. Students will love to create this lift-the-flap predictions activity as they hear the story for the first time.
You can add some Valentine fun to your daily word work! Students can use the letters in “valentine” to create new words. This hands-on activity is perfect for literacy centers or morning work time!
Students can also practice building CVC words with a valentine-themed activity. As they push the arrow, a new picture shows up in the heart. Then they can use letter cards to build a word that matches the picture.
Your students will also love practicing sight words by playing bingo…with a twist! As you display sight words, students can decide where they want to write them on their bingo cards. Then you can play bingo using small Valentine candies, mini erasers, or math manipulatives as bingo markers.
Another way to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a class is to discuss what you love about school! Each student can write and illustrate their own page for a “We Love School” class book.
Your students can also learn about nouns with this fun writing craftivity. They will write about a person, place, and thing that they love. The three hearts they create can be assembled into an adorable 3D Valentine’s Day craft!
You can also bring some Valentine’s Day fun to addition practice! Students can practice adding in different ways with this addition strategy book. Each page has a different addition equation to solve with space to practice four different addition strategies.
After practicing addition on a ten frame, students will be ready for this valentine-themed Make 10 activity! After rolling a die, they will place that many candies on their ten frame and figure out how many more they need to make ten.
You can also use dice and candies for this broken heart addition activity. Students will roll their die twice, adding candy to each half of their broken heart and then figuring out the sum.
Finally, students can demonstrate their knowledge of addition with a fun ladybug craft! Students will decorate their ladybug craft with hearts and then write a simple story problem and number sentence to describe it.
Students can also practice subtraction with hands-on and engaging activities. They can learn about and use a variety of subtraction strategies as they complete this subtraction book.
They can also use this interactive Valentine’s Day subtraction activity to act out and solve subtraction problems.
After practicing addition and subtraction in many different ways, they will be ready to complete activities using both skills. These sorting activities can help students practice shifting between addition and subtraction as they also explore how they are related.
Could your students use more practice with counting by ten? Use these valentine number cards for students to cut and paste their own number lines for counting practice.
Finally, what Valentine’s Day unit for kindergarten would be complete without some candy graphing? Students can sort candy hearts into different piles based on color, then graph the results.
You can also give each student a chocolate hug and a chocolate kiss for a taste test. After deciding which one they prefer, you can create a class graph with the results. Then students can fill out their own pie graph and summary of the taste test results.
All of the activities above (and more!) can be found in my printable Valentine’s Day unit for kindergarten. It is full of engaging literacy and math activities with a fun Valentine twist! Inside the resource, you’ll find a unit-at-a-glance PDF with a suggested sequence for the activities. You’ll be able to create a cohesive Valentine’s Day unit that will keep your students excited about learning!
If you’d like to take a closer look at this Valentine’s Day unit for kindergarten, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on TPT.
If you’d like to come back to these activities later, be sure to save this post! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be abe to quickly find these hands-on activities when you’re ready to plan your own Valentine’s Day unit for kindergarten. You might also be interested in this winter kindergarten unit!
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
