Getting Ready for Valentine's Day

I just love Valentine's Day in the classroom. It is just so fun. I love the crafts, making things for parents, exchanging cards, and all the pink. I love the candy, the excitement, and the games. Here's some of my go to favorite things to do on Valentine's Day.

1. I love Valentine's Day boxes that the students create. A few years ago, I started having students create Valentine's Day boxes with their families at home. Each year I cannot wait to see their creativity. Some of them are pretty simple and some are elaborate, but they are all so fun to see. Here is one from last year.

How amazing is that little owl? And the feathers were all made from hearts....super cute! I just sent out the project this Friday so my students can get started. I just can't wait to see this year's boxes. It's a great way to store all of those cards, pencils and candy that the students bring in to share with the class. Here is a blog post from last year with more ideas. 

2. I love doing this simple Valentine's day activity with conversation hearts. Students get a small box of the hearts and a writing paper. They create a story or a letter and use the conversation hearts in it. I did this way back in the day when I was in school. I always remembered how fun it was. Now I do this with my students. I enjoy hearing their stories each year after they write them. 

You can get this activity for free by clicking here. I have used this resource even with my firsties when I used to teach them. It is still something I could use in middle school or even high school too. Different age groups would just do longer or shorter stories.

3. I love the stories around Valentine's Day. I like to collect different stories to share this time of year, but these two are some of my favorites. This one is super cute. It's called Will you Be my Valentine? You can find it here.

This one is my number one top all-time favorite for Valentine's day. If you have never read it, you need to get your hands on a copy right now. It's called Somebody Loves you Mr. Hatch. you can find it here.

4. The games are so fun. In the past, I have enjoyed doing Minute to Win It Valentine's Day games in my class. My class has had a lot of fun with them and so have I. You can do a search and find a ton of different games but here is one example of a bunch of different options. 

5. I love giving cards. I try to put a lot of thought into the cards I give. Sometimes I have done a candy craft card to give out and that can be a lot of fun. This year I made several different cards. I'm really loving llamas right now so I created three different types of llama cards and also some flamingo cards. Here is what they look like. You can find them here, here, here, here, and here. 

So that's how we celebrate in our classroom, what about you?

So this year, as every other, we loaded up our family and headed off to experience something we would otherwise NEVER get to experience...a WHITE Christmas! Everything always seems to go well for us until (and this happens EVERY year)...someone gets sick. So this year has been the craziest of all. Usually just one of us falls prey to the sickness, but this year, every. single. adult. fell ill. The rest of us just got a cold...which is miserable, but at least you can still do things. But my husband came down with the flu and has had it since Wednesday! I'm so glad that we made good use of the time we had before he fell prey to the sickness. It is however putting a damper on our enjoyment of the snow that has been falling the last two days. It's like a winter wonderland out there, people, and we are stuck inside. First of all, we do rent a car, but my name is not attached to it. And secondly, being raised in Florida does not necessarily give you confidence to navigate hills in the snow. So, we have a car but can't go anywhere. Sigh....but at least we are together and I can go outside and walk around. There's a school not too far up the road and I think I will walk over to take the kids sledding at some point after lunch today, otherwise we may miss