Valentine’s Day is always a special day in the classroom. It’s a day to celebrate friendships, your classroom community, and kindness. This year, with social distancing, safety/health regulations, and distance learning, this day will need to look a bit different, but does not need to be forgotten.
Whether you’re handing out Valentine’s cards, mailing a small Valentine to your students, or celebrating digitally for distance learning, this can still be a special day for you and your students.
With my 5th graders this year, I will be handing out a small card and gift and we’ll be celebrating our class friendships and kindness with a digital activity. I’m jumping on the vinyl sticker train that so many upper elementary and middles love right now. My cards and digital activity both follow the sticker theme, with the saying, “Good friends stick together.” The printable Valentine’s Cards I’ll be handing out are below.
For stickers, I’ve ordered a few sets on Amazon that my students are going to flip over. There are SO MANY options available for waterproof stickers on Amazon for you to be sure to find some that match your students’ interests. I’ve ordered a Space/Nasa pack, an Among Us pack, and a VSCO pack for my students. Each pack includes 50-100 stickers, so I’ll have a lot of extra to add to my behavior/work prize jar.
These cards are perfect for face-to-face classrooms, or would be super easy to mail to your students. I think this theme is perfect for lower elementary, upper elementary, and middles. You can grab my free printable cards here.
I’ve also put together a digital version for students to create their own stickers to “hand-out” as their Valentines to their classmates. In this activity, each student gets a digital water bottle, and each student will create their own digital stickers. We’ll use Google Drawings or Canva.com to create our digital stickers, but students could use any other app they have access to that allows for this kind of creativity. My students will be told to focus on a kindness or friendship theme for their stickers, and to consider using words along with images to create their stickers. Then, students will download their image as a PNG file to their device so that they can insert the image onto their classmates’ digital water bottle in the Google Slides deck. I think this activity will be a fun, memorable, celebration activity that encourages kindness, creativity, and builds classroom community.
I’m excited to add this digital activity to my own class celebration this year and think it would be perfect for an in class activity, or as a distance learning class Valentine’s Celebration. You can get this digital activity to do with your students this Valentine’s Day here.
Jessica Gentry Teaching & Learning in Mrs. Gentry's Class 