5 (Easy) Valentine’s Day Centers for Teachers. Today, let’s talk about some easy centers you could set up for Valentine’s Day. These could be done in combination with a class party or all on their own. You could use all five that I have shared or mix and match with other ideas you have, omit, add extra; you know, the drill—you are a teacher adapting is what you do. These are the 5 Valentine’s Day centers I use with my student, so I’ll share them with you in this post. I have also done these for Dot Day (with modifications). If you want to see the Dot Day post, you’ll find it HERE.
There are many reasons to do centers/stations with your students. Here are a few of my top reasons!
Students (and adults) like choices. Choice-based learning has been widely adopted by educators. It’s not likely a new concept to you as an educator. The simple idea is to create a variety of centers (stations) and let children choose which ones they want to do. Some children will want to do them all; some will want to do only one or two. You can set up your stations so that children can choose to go through and pick the activities they want. You’ll have to limit how many children can be in one area, or else you’ll likely have all the kids showing up at the painting stations.
Another way to do centers/stations is to divide your students up into small groups. If you have five centers, then you’d have five groups. Then, have your students start at a station (all the kids spread out through all the stations). Set the time that kids will work at this center and then rotate the entire class to the next center.
Rotating centers are useful for Valentine’s Day centers when you have a limitation in supplies or when you want to work with messier materials. For example, if you wanted to paint with your students but had 30 kids in your class. Then, having one station for painting is easier to manage because painting with 5 or 6 children is less daunting than painting with 30. If you have a messy center that takes more guidance, you can include it with more independent centers that children can do without as much guidance.
Doing Valentine’s Day centers and a classroom party can help manage that “mess,” too. If, for example, there are cupcakes you want to give out to your students, you could have them rotate through getting cupcakes and then move to the various activities. If you have a parent volunteer, they can help hand out cupcakes, have students wash their hands, etc.
Decide on what your goal is when providing centers for your students. Then, once you have the centers set up, explain what happens at each center. You can type the instructions and print visuals and hang them up by each center (if you want to), or you can go through each activity with your students and explain how they work. If you have mixed in more independent ideas with more complex ones, there should be no problem.
Here are 5 Valentine’s Day Centers I have used with my students over the years.
The lovely thing about creating Valentine’s Day centers is that you can mix and match what works for your students. As I stated earlier, I like to mix messy with not-so-messy. I’m always looking to help support my students with their reading, writing, math, and more. Years ago, I created unique Pop Art coloring pages where children couldn’t “guess” the answer to the problem because of the clues given by the art—they had to do the work!
This collection has grown over the years, largely due to teachers requesting that I make more and more of them. I have a lot of resources in my TPT store that will help you easily (and quickly) review reading skills, math facts, place value, homophones, and parts of speech with your students, AND celebrate Valentine’s Day. You can add these as a center and let kids create and practice their skills.
Several of my art integration resources have specific components for Valentine’s Day. You can use these resources in so many different ways. Your students won’t even realize they are reviewing these important skills! Since these resources are yearly, you can use them for Valentine’s Day and then again for upcoming holidays. This is great because it allows students to practice important skills over and over again!
Here are just a few great ways to use these lessons…
I have a lot of Valentine’s Day resources on TPT. You can see all that I have HERE.
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