Fabulous Valentine’s Day Activities for your ESL Classroom

Valentine’s Day is here! Whether you're planning a party, doing a unit on love, or looking for a project to do with your students, I've got some suggestions for ideas this holiday:

• Make your students write a card to their mom or grandma.
• Teach students how to say "I love you" in different languages.
• Talk about the history of Valentine's day.
• How about going on a Valentine's Scavenger Hunt from Hands On As We Grow?
• Learn about how other countries celebrate Valentine's day.
• Sing a love song.
• Bake some heart shaped sweets/cookies.Ask students to make a short presentation about Valentine's Day in their country.
• Give students a short writing task about Valentine's Day
• Learn about Saint Valentine's Legend.

More ideas? Try these:

1-Sensory Bins

We adore sensory bins for supporting children to soak up newly learned vocabulary. Kids seem to love them too. Choose your favorite filling for your sensory bin (packing peanuts, cotton wool balls, lentils, for example) and then add themed items. Use this as an opportunity to ask children questions such as What is this? as well as encouraging them to follow key instructions like Point to the heart. This pack will provide you with inspiration for Valentine’s Day as well as other important days in February.

2- Dipped Marshmallows

Everyone knows that sweet treats go hand in hand with Valentine’s Day, and they really show you care for someone. This activity is a great hands-on one with the opportunity to practice English while being fully engaged and interacting. Life skills are vital for all students, so this blend of both those and sequencing stages of the activity will prove useful for your kids. To challenge your more able learners, remove the text, and encourage them to write a sentence to match each step. Instead of using the visuals included, you could get them to take photographs as they are making the dipped marshmallows, providing captions for each one.

3-Compliments

Being able to tell other people what we like about them can really boost someone’s self-esteem. However, it is also essential to think about what we like about ourselves. This compliments activity is excellent for both of those things. Provide each student with a heart. They should write something that they like or respect about someone else in the class within it. For some students, you could provide them with a sentence starter like I like … because s/he is. For others, you could just leave them blank. They should do a similar thing thinking about themselves.

4-Roll and Tell

Roll and Tell is a great way to get children working collaboratively. Put them in pairs or small groups and provide them with the board, which you will have printed and laminated in advance. Give them each a die and get them to roll it, saying the word which corresponds to the number. Sounds too easy? There is no reason why you cannot easily stretch your students’ learning even further by encouraging them to use the word within a sentence.

5-Jumbled Sentences

Being able to form full sentences is an essential skill when learning a new language. However, so many teachers focus predominantly on the spoken word rather than incorporating the written side of things. This mixed up sentences activity pack is perfect for practicing piecing together sentences. Not only that, but they can also work on their use of punctuation, letter formation and correct spacing. The fact that these are themed around Valentine’s Day makes it more exciting.

I hope that you have found some of these Valentine’s Day classroom ideas helpful in your preparations for this important day. There are plenty more to try, if you need even more inspiration! If you have any Valentine’s Day classroom ideas of your own to share, please do so using the comments section below.