MATH for VALENTINE'S DAY
I love when I can incorporate holidays with learning. It can be so simple and it makes whatever lesson I am teaching that much more fun for the kids and me! Right now in Math, students are learning how to make a fraction, decimal and percentage with a number. This *FREE* activity I found on Teachers Pay Teachers was perfect timing for us! I gave each student a baggie full of candy hearts (the one and only time I will give candy to my class!! I know, I am a boring teacher who advocates way too much for healthy foods and way of living, but it's ok..they still love me). So each student has a bag of candy hearts and they need to find the fraction of each color of hearts in their bag. Step one, of course, is to count the candies in order to find their denominator. Then they work to find the fraction, decimal and percentage. They also collected data to find the mean, median, mode, minimum and maximum which was an awesome review! I love, love, love this activity because it was so engaging and the class really had a great time doing it! No one grumbled or cared that they were practicing math! It was perfect!
VALENTINE'S CELEBRATION
I remember Valentine's Day being one of my favorite holidays as a kid! Switching cards in class and feeling the love all around was just awesome! So last year, I came up with a great way to celebrate Valentine's Day in a way that didn't take up too much class time and allowed students to still have some fun with it. What I did was assign each student with the task of creating ONE totally awesome Valentine's Day card for an unknown recipient. The way it goes is, each student brings in a card that they created which could be given to anyone in the classroom. Then, on Valentine's Day or today (Friday the 13th!) they draw a name from the box and present their card to that person. I absolutely love this because the kids have sooo much fun creating these cards. You can tell from the pictures below that they REALLY got into it! Maybe it is all the bright and fun colors, but just looking at these cards makes me feel happy!