Valentine’s Day Unit Study

Valentine’s is an excellent time of year to talk in our homes about the meaning of love, and the symbols used and why.

DIY Valentine’s Day Decorations
Fun do-it-yourself Valentine’s Day decoration ideas to make with your children or for your teens to do on their own!

Printable Valentine’s Day Cards
Type your own message into these folded cards.

Valentine’s Day Animal Crafts 
Using heart shapes and small purchased eyes, make these darling animals.

How to Cut Out a Heart Shape

1. Fold a piece of red or pink paper in half.
2. Put the folded side going up and down.
3. Starting at the fold, draw slightly more than half a circle going up and away from the fold.
4. From the end of that half circle, draw a diagonal line down to the fold. The further away from where you started the slimmer the heart will be.
5. With the paper still folded, cut along your line, going through both halves of the paper.
6. Unfold the heart!

Food Traditions

My Mother’s Chocolate Valentine
I bought a box of chocolate hearts,
a present for my mother,
they looked so good I tasted one,
and then I tried another.

Red foods…
Bring an assortment of red foods to your homeschool support group…

What nutrients do red foods provide? What concerns do some people have about red food dye in foods? In the list above, which foods are naturally red and which are not?

The Sweet Lure of Chocolate
Why does chocolate make us feel so good? Where does chocolate come from?

Weigh Your Candy Gifts
Measure and weigh a cup of plain, white sugar. A cup of sugar has 770 calories. If your candy is mostly sugar, estimate how many calories it all has together.

A heart-shaped Slinky toy. Do you think it will work as well as a circular one? Why or why not?[/caption]

Games & Puzzles

Valentine’s Day Crossword Puzzle
Print out the template and solve the clues to fill in the crossword.  There is an easier, “picture crossword”, option and a more standard type of crossword available.

Valentine’s Day Games
Even a Pokemon Contest here!

Valentines Day Logic Puzzle
Cody, Brandon, Ethan, Aaron, Jordan, Robert, and Michael each gave one Valentine’s Day card to a girl in their class. The girls Jennifer, Amber, Olivia, Kaitlyn, Grace, Alyssa, and Alexandra each received one Valentine’s Day card and want to know who gave it to them.

The Heart

Arrange to get a cow, pig or sheep heart from a butcher shop. Dissect it. Not for the faint of heart.

Heart & Blood
Our heart pumps blood throughout our body, but how and why?

History of Valentines Day

The History of Valentine’s Day
The history of Valentine’s Day is obscure and further clouded by various fanciful legends.

Language Arts

DLTK’s Custom Writing Paper
Looking for a way to create themed writing paper?  The next few steps will allow you to choose a theme for the top and bottom borders of your paper as well as choose a custom image to dress it up.

The Best Valentine’s Day Ever
A play to perform. Setting: a game room. There is a long table piled high with boxed games and puzzles. CHRISTY and DIEGO are playing checkers or chess at a small table set stage left. By Brenda B. Covert.

Valentines Day Word Search
Snuggle with a friend and get hugs and kisses here!

Valentine’s Day Themed Spelling
Practice Valentine’s Day themed spelling words on a 4th-grade level.

Math with a Valentines Theme

Heart Geoboard Math Activity
Make a simple geoboard with cheap and easy find materials! Fine activity ideas for STEM fun!

Valentine’s Day Math Ideas
Valentine’s Day resources for math! Includes math games, activities, and printables, with a Valentine’s Day theme that makes math fun and interesting. Pinterest board with lots of pins.

Valentine’s Day Math Worksheets
This page includes Valentine’s Day math worksheets decorated with Valentine’s Day symbols on math topics such as patterning, multiplying and dividing. These worksheets cover some basic topics that you might want to review the week or day of Valentine’s. We hope you appreciate the extra love that we put into these worksheets.

Valentine Symbols Counting Worksheet
For children who are just learning to count and recognize and write numerals.

Valentine’s Day Themed Math Pages
For kids around 6 – 10 years old.

Valentine Exchange
If your homeschool support group had 21 children, and each gave a Valentine card to each of the other children, how many cards would be exchanged in all? (Remember, you don’t give a card to yourself!)

Valentine Geometry
Advanced: If your heart cutout consisted of two half circles and two triangles, can you discover the area of your paper heart?

Music and Poetry

Children form a circle facing inward and sing-song. IT circles around behind them, and quietly drops a Valentine behind one child, then takes off fast in either direction. The selected child grabs Valentine and takes off in the other direction. First back to the space in the circle is “safe,” and the other child becomes IT. Play the video with the song, or learn the song and sing it yourself.

Valentine’s Day Songs & Poems
For small children.

Science and Valentines’ Themes

Make a banana split with the following aphrodisiacs:

• Banana – because of shape.
• Peaches – feminine looking, juicy. Turn on for the Chinese.
• Chocolate sauce – who doesn’t know chocolate is a turn on!
• Sprinkle with pine nuts – did it for the Romans!

Take a poll before and after whether or not anyone feels like kissing anyone else. Do they change their minds after the dessert? Should be good for some giggles.

Goldenrod Paper Valentines
When this paper meets a basic substance it turns bright red… so, why wouldn’t it make the perfect

Valentine’s Day experiment? Just add your favorite Valentine shapes to this acid/base experiment and you will end up with the most amazing scientific Valentines you’ve ever seen!

Start making Valentine’s crystals now
They should be ready by the 14th.
Twist the pipe cleaners into the shape of a heart, with a “stem” left to hook over pencil on top of a STRAIGHT SIDED container. (I learned this the hard way, you can tell. You can’t get the crystal out of any non-straight container!) Experiment on seeing what you can add to the solution to make the crystals red. (food coloring, cherry or beet juice – what else?)

Optics of red.
As the eye sees red – tire your eyes of seeing red.
Stare intently at a red sheet of paper for 30 seconds of longer. Then switch to staring at a white or black sheet. What do you notice? On a color wheel, what color is exactly opposite of red? Compare to the color you saw on the second sheet. Why do you think this happens?

Shine a light through a prism, creating a rainbow. Where in the rainbow does red appear? Top? Bottom? Between which other colors?

Has the heart always been the “organ of love?”
In the Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, “True love,” Orsino says, using a typically Elizabethan analogy, “lies in one’s liver, and a woman’s love lies only on the tip of her tongue.”

What is Love? – A Scientific Perspective

Check out Wiki Love…
Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness.

Why is it important to talk about love?
Does everyone mean the same thing when they use the word love? Is loving your mom the same as loving chocolate or your country?

Learn how to say “I love you” in several different languages
Why do you think some cultures have one word for “love” while others have very many? This is the scientific study called linguistics or etymology, both valid sciences.

Tags: holidays