Lesson Theme: Valentine's Day!

(Pretend this is February 14th) Happy Valentine's Day everyone!  ;)
Here are some snippets from our holiday theme...

We've been practicing fact families for subtraction so I made some fact families on heart doilies, cut them apart, and had Miss A figure out which ones went together.

This was a probability freebie from The First Grade Parade.  LOVE her site!  Very creative.  :)

We practiced symmetry by painting hearts on one side, folding them, and opening them up again.  As you can see, there was at least one heart where Miss A was getting a little carried away with painting and forgot about just doing one side.  :)

They turned out so pretty that I decided to string them up for some Valentine's Day decoration!

A while ago, I saw (wish I had pinned it!) an activity that was done using empty chocolate boxes.  Genius!  :)

While I cannot remember what the activity was or where I saw it - the idea stayed with me.  I loved the concept of using the empty boxes so much that I decided I would just have to come up with something on my own this year.  I cut out some brown paper circles, squares and rectangles for pretend chocolates.  On one side of each, I wrote things I wanted my kiddos to practice (math facts, spelling words, letters, etc.)  Using a blank heart with circles that I found here (with a different fun activity), I wrote the match of each chocolate on a circle.

Miss A and Mr. J enjoyed seeing what was on the back of their "chocolates" when turned over.  They would match the word or problem (the answer to the problem) to a circle on the heart paper which they then colored in.

Valentine picks to the rescue!  We used these as pointers!  :)

Of course, what would Valentine's Day be without a special love note or two?  It's the perfect time to practice letter writing skills!  :)

I set up a love letter writing center complete with heart stationary, envelopes (these had some pretend glittery heart stamps I drew in the stamp area), a bunch of different Valentine-ish pens/pencils in a fancy vase, and a mailbox.  I also included a cute printable I found that shows the parts of a letter so Miss A would have something to refer to when writing her letters - and write she did!!!  She LOVED it and encouraged others to use the center too.  :)

When the letters had been written and sealed, we dropped them in the pretend mailbox and Miss A helped me sort and deliver them into the appropriate individual household mailboxes the night before Valentine's Day.

Here's a picture of a couple of the cutest mailboxes we found at Target in the dollar section this year.  Perfect for stuffing with love letters!  :)

I also decided it would be neat to make a little fold-out heart book with Miss A.  I just love reading what she comes up with for activities where some of the writing is left up to her.

I had the book "Guess How Much I Love You" (see link below) in the back of my mind so this kind of goes along with that idea.  The heart book cover starts out with "I Love You" and then folds out with other pages continuing the thought (Miss A's responses in italics) "as long as ___(the world), as high as ___(the sky), as deep as___(the sea), as big as ___(a bear), as far as___(heven), as ___(nice) as ___(a flowr).

Here's how I made the book:  I cut out some hearts, wrote the text on one side of each (and added a border), glued them to a couple sentence strip pieces, folded it up, and tied it with a pink ribbon.

And now for my Valentine's gift to YOU!  :)  I finally bought a license and can now offer freebies I make!  Yippeee!  :)  I am pretty excited about that, and I hope you are too!

I have been working on a Hot Chocolate Mini Activity Pack (should be available in my TPT store soon) and decided to make one of the activity pages into a freebie that people could incorporate into a Christmas, Valentine's Day, or Winter theme.  Hope you LOVE it!  :)  Download it FREE here.

Linking up to:
www.sunscholars.blogspot.com
www.homeschoolcreations.blogspot.net
www.tatertotsandjello.com