UPDATE 1/26/2021 – Here is my up-to-date Wakelet collection of Valentine’s Day resources.
I was going to title this post, “VD is Making me ADD.” Fortunately I realized that was a bad idea – for so many reasons.
Well, I kind of lied. I have been saying for two days that all of my posts this week would be about the TCEA conference I attended last week. But then one Valentine resource popped up. And then another. And I thought that some of you might actually want to learn about them before Valentine’s Day which, of course, for those of us in the U.S. who follow the Hallmark Holiday Calendar, is this coming Saturday.
Even though it’s not my favorite holiday, Valentine’s Day does lend itself to some fun classroom activities. I’ve already posted a bunch of resources. It’s kind of sad, actually, that I have more links to Valentine’s Day resources than Presidents’ Day. I think it’s a silent rebellion against working on a day that the students get a holiday…
Anyway, here are a couple more to add to the list of ways to have fun teach critical thinking and problem solving skills that are vital for standardized testing 😉
Valentine’s Day Sudoku – I have some other links to online and printable sudoku puzzles here, but these free printables are particularly well-suited for Kinder and 1st graders.
Hopscotch Hearts – I thought it would be fun for my students to use Hopscotch (the iPad coding app) to make something Valentine-y, and they have been working on their own ideas on and off for a couple of weeks. (You can see what a few of my 2nd graders have done so far here – most of them haven’t finished, yet.) Then I saw a tweet from Hopscotch about a new tutorial they just posted to make a “Pixel Art Heart.” My 3rd graders tried it out yesterday and really liked it. A few of them finished the code and then started modifying it to make the heart bigger or smaller as well as different colors. A couple of other students messed up on the code and I loved watching their peers working with them to try to figure out where they went wrong. (Because I had absolutely no idea!)
So those are my two off-task suggestions for today. I would promise that I’ll be back to the plan tomorrow, but who knows what will capture my attention between now and then?
