If you school is like mine, Valentine’s day is a difficult day to get anything done with the constant interruptions of singing grams and Valentine’s deliveries and no one can see because one kid has a bouquet of balloons that covers half of the class and half the class is all hopped up on chocolates or grumpy because they don’t have a balloon, singing gram or chocolates.
This is a super simple Valentine’s activity you can use in all levels.
Materials:
- Labels (enough for each student to have at least 2, but ideally several). Run, don’t walk to the phone and call the secretary in charge of supplies and ask if s/he has any old ones for the dot matrix printer or that have something printed on them that they don’t use. You could also use stickies and tape.
- A Valentine’s heart. Here’s a template with three different ways to print your hearts. Select print slides and print the version that you want.
- On each of the labels students write in the target language at least one positive, complimentary sentence about their partner and at least one positive, complimentary sentence about someone else in the class. The more the better. In lower levels this might just be: You are nice or You are funny. In higher levels they can write why: You are nice because you always say hello or you are nice because you helped me with my homework. In lower levels you may want to brainstorm a list of adjectives first. You might also want to model by making sentences for the principal or a team teacher. They should try to be a specific as their language level allows.
- (Teacher step) Walk around and make sure that there wasn’t a knucklehead who wrote: you smell or equivalent. Also be prepared with several labels of your own for students who may not get as many labels as other students.
- Students stand up and walk around and place the label gently (important direction for possible knucklehead-ness) on the back of the student to whom it belongs and say what it is.
- Once all labels have been distributed, students return to their original partner who removes the labels and puts them on the heart paper. If you use stickies, tape them down during this step.
Et voilà, each student has a nice Valentine’s day heart with lovely sentences about them. I had students who would keep this in the front of the binder for the rest of the year.