Valentine's Day

I'm going to start by saying: I hate parties. What teacher doesn't? I don't like how crazy it makes the kids and I don't like how hopped up on sugar they tend to get. So I do it differently in my room. Instead of "wasting" a day with a party, I incorporate the holiday into my day. For example, I didn't do an entire week of Valentine's Day activities, as my coworkers did (frankly, that would bore me to pieces... we did a week on feelings and emotions instead). I did make a day of it, though. Heart themed art, conversation heart math and science, name activities... Plus our "party."

We sorted and graphed how many candy hearts we had (I forgot to take a photo with all the candy hearts still ON the graph!). We've sorted things before and placed them on graphs, but we've not taken the results and colored in graphs. The kids I expected to "get it" quickly did, but there was one or two surprises. One of  my girls who really just takes things at her own pace actually did MUCH better than I expected -- probably because she knew she'd be getting candy at the end. Ha!

My favorite activity, though, was this freebie I picked up from Teachers Pay Teachers.

We had 3 cups of liquid and hypothesized what would happen if we dropped some candy hearts in each. They then drew the results. I got some AMAZING drawings, considering my kids are only 4!

All in all, my Valentine's Day was a lot of fun! Hope yours was too!