It’s that time of year when the teachers on our team start thinking about Valentine’s Day craft ideas for the classroom. This is a holiday that can quickly take over if you let it, so how do you balance the fun of a heartfelt celebration with all that you still have to get done in February?
Get ready for the ultimate list of kid-appropriate classroom crafts for Valentine’s Day that’s been carefully created by our teacher team.
While Valentine’s Day is typically about romantic love — something that really has no place in a classroom — you can use Valentine’s Day as a springboard to talk about ‘loving’ your neighbour, friendship and general kindness.
Random Acts of Kindness Day is 17 February this year if you want to refocus these crafts on kindness!
Fun Valentine’s Day Crafts for Kids
Shaving Cream and Food Dye Artwork
If you don’t mind getting a little messy, this easy craft idea is great for younger year levels to help develop their fine motor skills while creating something unique for Valentine’s Day.
NSW Year 3 teacher @ms.h.teachused this idea with students for Earth Day, but it’s also perfect for making a DIY Valentine’s Day classroom display or card.
Here’s how to make it:
- Spread a thick layer of shaving cream to cover a baking tray or similar-sized tray.
- Add drops of food colouring (green, blue and red) over the shaving cream.
- Get students to use kebab sticks (or their fingers) to spread the food dye in the shaving cream, making patterns and shapes.
- Once finished, take a plain piece of paper and lay it down on top of the coloured shaving cream.
- Take the paper off and allow the transferred pattern to dry.
- Once dry, cut a circle from the green/blue pattern and a heart from the red pattern.
- Glue the pieces together on card stock to create a display or greeting card.
Create a Heart Classroom Window Display
The ‘love’ focus of the holiday doesn’t have to be romantic. Valentine’s Day is an excellent opportunity to think about and celebrate what makes our hearts happy, such as hobbies, foods and places!
Year 4 Reception Teacher Miss D of@missdteaching_created this beautiful gratitude display in her classroom for students to reflect on what makes them happy.
Create Geometric Hearts in STEM
Bring the fun of the holiday into your STEM activities with a craft that tests students’ understanding ofgeometric shapes and engineering principles. The challenge for students is to design and construct a geometric heart using straws, pipe cleaners and other classroom supplies (e.g. tape, scissors, etc.)!The hearts should showcase symmetry and incorporate at least three different geometric shapes.
When students have completed their hearts, hang them around the classroom as Valentine’s Day decor.
Write About Things You Love
Why not take your Valentine’s Day craft to the next level and incorporate a writing prompt like this idea from Perth early years teacher@myenchantedclassroom?
She said,‘Today for Valentine’s Day we took time to get to know each other and the things we love. The children shared with each other and then drew and sounded out words in their heart. They then worked with me to write their sentences. This was a lovely opportunity to connect with each of my children…’
This is another perfect way to use our downloadableHeart Templatesfor students to fill and colour in with everything they love.Once finished, kids can proudly take it home to share with their loved ones and pop it on the fridge.
Make ‘Stained Glass’
Make your Valentine’s Day classroom activities double as classroom decor with ‘stained glass’ hearts that you can display on the windows of the classroom to add a bit of colour to the day.
How to make stained glass hearts:
Use the front page of our I Love You to Pieces Cardto create colourful confetti hearts.
- Print off the card template and cut out the centre of the heart.
- Using clear contact paper, stick a piece on the backside of the heart so that the sticky side is in the middle of the heart on the front side.
- Students stick small pieces of tissue paper all over the inside.
- Stick the confetti hearts to your window for a beautiful stained glass effect.
Build Heart Books
Another favourite Valentine’s Day craft idea for the classroom among members of our teacher team is this heart book. They’re a little more complicated to make than the stained glass hearts, but they’re a great lesson in symmetry for your Year 1 and 2 students, and they work for a number of year levels.
Once they’re done creating their heart books, turn them into a social emotional learning opportunity. Students can pass them around the room, and their classmates can write one positive thing about them in the book. This helps avoid hurt feelings that can occur when students hand out Valentine’s Day cards to their peers and encourages empathy in your classroom.
Make Rainbow Heart Artwork
If you’re looking for even simpler (yet just as beautiful!) Valentine’s art idea,@ms.h.teachhas given us more inspiration.
To create this rainbow heart, you’ll need some oil pastels to draw the heart outlines and then paint over the top using watercolour paint, food dye or inks. Let the artwork dry and turn it into a card or Valentine’s display.
Create an I Love You to Pieces Valentine’s Card
Here’s another fun Valentine’s Day card idea to make with your class! Creating ‘I Love to Pieces’ Valentines is the perfect activity to add to a lesson on writing using figurative language, such as idioms.
Australian primary school teacher Hayley Farrugia of@followingmissfarrugiaswears by this activity, saying,‘This resource is brilliant in its simplicity and versatility. It is perfect for any special occasion…’
Here’s what you need to make it:
- ‘I Love You to Pieces’ Valentine’s Day Card Template.
- Tissue paper to stick inside the heart — cut up into squares, this becomes the ‘pieces’ of the heart
- Glue
- Scissors
- Coloured pencils or crayons
- Pencil
Incorporate this activity into your figurative writing lessons with a discussion of what makes ‘I Love You to Pieces’ an idiom and how to use idioms in your writing.
Practise Fine Motor Skills With Heart Threading
Develop fine motor skills while creating a gift for your students to bring home to a loved one.
Print the freeHeart Template on cardstock, cut it out and punch holes around the edge of the heart. Using a piece of yarn, have students thread in and out of each hole around the heart. Make sure you tape the end of the yarn to the back of the heart before the student begins threading, and tape the end to the back when they have finished the last hole.
Once they have finished threading the yarn, have them ball up pieces of red tissue paper to fill the middle of the heart.Not only does it make the heart a bit more festive, but it is an easy way to build the muscles in your students’ fingers!
You can leave it at that, or you can turn it into a Valentine’s Day card like we did below by mounting the threaded heart on cardstock and adding an ‘I love you’ message.
Write Fun Letters With Funny Valentine’s Cards
Will you be doing a Valentine’s Day card exchange in the classroom this year? Turn the card exchange into a writing activity by creating your own cards with this monstrously fun ‘I’ve Got My Eyes On You’Valentine’s Day Card Template or the printable ‘You’re Out of This World’Valentine’s Day Card Template.
Having students make cards for classmates and practise writing fun letters is a good way to ensure every child gets a Valentine, and providing the templates in class helps to ensure even students whose parents cannot afford to purchase cards are included in the festivities.
To make the exchange more equitable and avoid hurt feelings, consider having students choose one name out of a hat. This will be the person they write their card out to, cutting down on all the time that would be spent on making individual cards for everyone.
Create Valentine’s Day Cardholder Bags
Keep the classroom neat and tidy with their own Valentine’s Day bags to collect and then carry home their sweets!
Students can make a favourite animal using construction paper and other craft supplies (like the owl below), then paste it onto the front of a large paper bag. The bag can be left on the student’s desk, and when students arrive in the classroom on Valentine’s Day, they can walk around from desk to desk, delivering cards to the waiting cardholders.
Don’t have time for students to start designing their own animals from scratch? Try these printablebee and fox bag templatesfor personalising their cardholder bags.
Fun Valentine’s Day Activities for the Classroom
Are you looking for more activities to keep the fun of Valentine’s Day going in your classroom? You don’t have to stop at crafts!
Learn Fun Facts About Valentine’s Day
Did you know that Mr. Richard Cadbury was the first person to create chocolates specifically for Valentine’s Day? Or that chocolate dates back to the Mayans and the Aztecs?
Watch this fact-filled video, and ask your students to create a fact page about the day!Or why not have your students read how other cultures around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day?
Complete Conversation Heart Activities
Conversation hearts have been a Valentine’s Day staple since 1866, and while the messages on these delicious treats might have changed over the last century and a half, their popularity definitely hasn’t. Why not bring these fun treats into the classroom for your students to enjoy with paper conversation hearts?
Here are five easy activities using conversation hearts that we think your students would love to do in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day!
1. Alphabetical Order
Putting words in alphabetical order can be tricky for many of our students, so why not have them practice using these fun treats? Print off a set of our Conversation Hearts on card and cut them out. Use them as an activity during literacy rotations.
2. Rhyming Words
Rhyming wordsare an important foundational language skill for students to understand. Thisactivityis an easy and fun way to help your students notice and work with sounds within words.
Have them choose a conversation heart randomly and list as many rhyming words for the word or phrase that appears on their heart.
4. Sentence Writing
Do you have reluctant writers in your classroom? This activity is sure to get them writing! Have your students choose a conversation heart randomly and write a silly sentence that includes the word or phrase that they chose. For your intermediate students, specify which type of sentence they must write — simple, compound or complex! For an added layer of fun, why not give them a die and tell them odd numbers are compound sentences and even numbers are complex sentences. Then have them roll with each heart to determine which type of sentence they should write.
Only have a few minutes left in class? Randomly draw a conversation heart and write an elaborate sentence as a whole class. Keep a running record of the word count for each of your sentences, and make it a class competition. Your students will be begging to play in no time!
Add A Little Bit of Heart to Maths
Add a Valentine’s Day twist to your math lessons!Practice subitising with a heart numbers game, review multiplication facts, or cover addition facts for the holiday with a heart template.
Write Acrostic Poems About Love
Want to bring English activities into focus?
Creating acrostic poems for Valentine’s Day is a great way to have your students work on vocabulary and spelling all at the same time! To extend students’ learning, why not have them choose one of the words and write a fun acrostic poem?Or offer up an acrostic poem template for students to complete based on the word ‘love’ that students can use as a guide?
Download this acrostic template today.
Celebrate the School Library
Have you heard that 14 February is also Library Lovers’ Day? That’s right!
Use the day as an opportunity to explore the school library.
Our Why We Love the Library Heart Template is a heartfelt Valentine’s Day activity that willencourage students to talk about what they love about their school library.
Create a Gratitude Wall
Start Valentine’s Day with a grateful heart. Use the day as inspiration for your students to pour their hearts out with gratitude-filled hearts for their classmates.
Why not ask your students to think about something they’re grateful for that another student has done?
“I loved it when Sarah helped me with reading last week!”
Ask each student to write one thing they’re grateful for on a heart shape,and display them on your wall to create a classroom gratitude wall that’s brimming with love!
