Valentine's Day Activites and Games for Kids
Learning and Playing Valentine’s Day Themed Lessons
Jan 22, 2009
Valentine's Day can be about more than exchanging cards and candy. Whether planning for a class party, creating lesson plans for the month of February, or searching for fun after school activities, the following games can bring smiles and laughter to kids of many ages.
Playing Valentine’s Bingo for Children at Parties or School
This game begins with bingo cards with alphabet letters filling the grid. One card is necessary for each child. The instructor must prepare word strips related to the holiday of Valentine’s Day on slips of paper. These slips are then read aloud and children must seek and find the letters used on their bingo game cards. Candy hearts might be used as markers for the bingo game. The game can include words such as “love” “cupid,” “heart” or any words appropriate to the theme and the spelling ability of the group. Play continues until a player covers a row or column or some predetermined “bingo” pattern.
Valentine’s Heart Matching Game Activity for Kids
This game begins with prepared paper hearts cut in half in various patterns to create unique matching puzzle pieces. For this game to work each pair of pieces should only fit together with each other to create one heart. There should be enough hearts for each child to have at least one half, but the game can last through several sessions as long as only matched sets are distributed for each round. These hearts can be plain, allowing the children to match the pattern only, or they may contain matched sets of information. For example, a math problem may be written on one half and the solution on the other, a word and definition, or a history question and answer. As the children search the room seeking their match they may encounter many incorrect matches before finding their “true love” match.
Cupid’s Arrow Bull’s-Eye Game for Valentine’s Fun
This game consists of a bull’s eye design taped or placed on the floor in an open area, bean bags, and any lesson that contains possible combinations. For example, a bull’s eye made of three large concentric rings containing numerals spaced in random order could allow for games of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or simple division. Each child tosses two bean bags which land on two numbers. The child then applies these numbers to the predetermined skill set practicing addition by adding the two and calling out the sum, etc. Or, vocabulary or spelling words could be spread throughout the bull’s-eye pattern and after the toss the child would create a sentence using the two words together. Or perhaps phonics skills could be applied as children toss a single bean bag, call out the letter struck, it’s sound, and a word begun by this letter.
Games that include the excitement of the holiday and an element of learning can create a fun lesson that will work in many different settings. These games can be played as suggested or applied to many different subjects and themes.
