Valentine's Day Fourth and Second Grade

Hi all-  It's Damien!  Kelly and I will be joint blogging this post to share about our Valentine's activities.  Some background information before we begin. In order to battle childhood obesity and to "save the instructional integrity of the day" our Valentine's (non)celebrations had to be low key.  It's sad when we forget that we are working with children, but I'll get off my soapbox for now because this is a FUN post about what we were able to do.  


FOURTH GRADE:

I started my Valentine boxes on Wednesday.  I was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest and was going to have my class turn their Cheerios boxes into Hedwig, the snow-white owl from the Harry Potter series.  Perfect for my classroom theme, perfect since we just began The Sorcerer's Stone, and perfect because they wouldn't take forever.  Our first task was feathers!  We covered our boxes with white copy paper and used strips of tissue paper cut and folded to build our feathers.  Take a look!

So, day 1 was happily complete including some music from my Disney Pandora playlist and then it SNOWED....AGAIN!  On Thursday we had our 5th snowday of the school year and although I enjoyed sleeping in, all I kept thinking was "Doesn't Al Roker know I have Valentine Boxes to finish?". (I blame all bad wether on Al Roker).  

And then...Friday was  a delayed opening.  Again all the joys of sleeping in but we had some boxes to finish so cards could be distributed.  As soon as the kiddos arrived, we got to work. Although I had originally envisioned wings and fethers all around, I was rather pleased with the final result. 

After cards were distributed we celebrated friendship with some chocolate fondue.  We were only allowed to dip healthy items (apples, bananas, strawberries) but I was able to sneak in some graham crakers and pretzels.  It was a nice way to spend a delayed opening. Now I'm going to turn it over to Kelly for a Second Grade Valentine's Day. 

Take a peek at a February ELA activity I did with my fifth graders last year that had them analyzing the characters in their novels. Literature Love Letters

See ya later Buddies, 
Damien 

SECOND GRADE: We were also supposed to keep it low key in 2nd grade.  So I saved our extra recess time we earned and incorporated it into celebration time.  I always do centers for my parties, I mean celebrations!  So we had four centers: delivering Valentine's (with no candy attached), eating yummy cupcakes, unscramble the Valentine words, and candy shop vowels.  Yes, I did sneak in some learning but this class loves to learn.  Here are some pictures:

  Love the ipod boxes.

                                            Unscramble the Valentine words

                                                                              

                                        Yummy cupcakes

                                   Long vowel learning!!

If my kiddos finished early at any of the centers they grabbed a clipboard which had a valentine word search.  15 minute rotations work perfect!  Another successful low key celebration.

Reading Buddies and Valentine's were both on Friday!  So we gathered our classes together and Damien read Roses are Red Violets are Pink Your Feet Really Stink by Deanna DeGroat.  The story has a perfect message and cute poems. Then our kids wrote their own poems about friendship.  Great Reading Buddy lesson.

What did you do on Valentine's Day?

Kelly