Valentine's Day

February 12, 2016

Today was our Valentine's Day party! Being an elementary teacher adds a new level of excitement to Valentine's Day. I'm a very crafty individual and I had a blast making all of the valentines for my students. I forgot how exciting it was for the students too. The classroom parties weren't until the afternoon but all day the students kept asking when they could pass out their valentines that they brought.

My teacher planned a math activity that was Valentine's Day themed which I really liked. Each student got a bag of 10 SweetHearts. They had a packet to follow through. At the top of the packet was ten heart outlines. Their first step was to color each heart to match what was in their bag. (Example: 3 pink hearts, color 3 hearts pink). After that they made fractions for each color heart. My co-op showed that the denominator or "whole" would always be 10 because that's how many SweetHearts were in their bags. After making all of their fractions we showed them how to make a graph to represent their findings.

Not only was this a great fraction review but since it was Valentine's Day themed and had manipulatives it really held the students' interest on a day that could have easily be wasted academically because of their excitement. This was a great lesson for me when thinking about planning for future holidays in the classroom.