Today is sort of a double post for you - well deserved because I haven't exactly been steaming up the blogging world with my posts lately... I also blogged over at Who's Who and Who's New about my
You can click on the image to visit me over there. I'm planning on having LOTS of moments to teach with once Wednesday comes around. I am done with snow. Done. No more. Finished.
I had big plans for Valentine's Day on Friday. It's one of my favorite holidays to spend with the kids. I love all the niceness, kindness and general love-ness that goes on. I originally told my kiddos that if we didn't have school on Friday, then we would still exchange valentines when we came back, but no party. This weekend I started thinking... I was planning on doing the party-part of the day as an introduction to a writing activity we're doing about making and eating ice cream sundaes. Which I still plan on writing about this coming week... soooooo, since we are going to exchange valentines anyway, and we're still going to make sundaes... it's kind of like the real Valentine's Day after all!
Here are my modified plans, along with a few freebies. Maybe some of you can use them this week for your belated Valentine's Day activities, or you can save them until next year.
In previous years, I have always told my students NOT to put names on their valentines for who they are for - only their name for who it is from. We would sit in a circle with our valentine bags and everyone would just walk around and drop in a valentine for every bag. Easy-peasy... 400 valentines (20 kids with 20 cards!) in under 10 minutes. This year, I decided to change things up. I plan on having students start by alphabetizing their valentines. Then we'll sit in our circle - in alphabetical order - and have two or three kids go around the circle, dropping their valentines into the bags. Still easy, but some good practice there, as well.
After everyone has had a chance to open cards, squeal, shout and smile about all the valentines, I'm going to have them do some sorting. Katie at Teacher to the Core did an amazing job sharing 5 great tips for keeping Valentine's Day smooth - and one had to do with sorting valentines. After we sort - and I think I might start by having them generate ways to sort their own valentines first - we'll do a little "Find a Valentine."
and a valentine scavenger hunt
You can pick up both (along with a word search I threw in there because my kiddos love word searches) by clicking on the images.
That should pretty much do it for the party part... of course we have the ice cream sundae part, which will be a whole other story... Wish me luck!
No comments