Valentine’s Day is not just about sweethearts; it’s a wonderful opportunity to promote a caring and engaging learning environment for your elementary multilingual learners. Here are some “heartwarming” suggestions to celebrate Valentine’s Day in your ESL classroom!
Add Valentine Bulletin Boards or Decor
ESL Classroom Valentine Decor: Decorations can help create a warm and inviting atmosphere. You can add “love” in different languages or heart shaped flags from around the world. Check out the beautiful ideas from Language Adventurist. She has at least 3 different options. Just click on the photo for a link to the one shown. A link to her blog post is below!
Make Valentine's Day Cards
Valentine’s Day Cards: Encourage your students to express their creativity and language skills by making Valentine’s Day cards for their classmates or members of their family. Provide templates with sentence starters to assist English learners as needed. Use paper and stickers or ready made options to color. Click on the picture above to get ready to send cards. You can print them in black and white for students to color and add their own note on the back. Or you could print these cards to give to your students. Click on the picture for this freebie on TPT.
Do Valentine Write the Room and Sentence Building Activities
Fun Valentine Themed Activities: Work on sentence structure and high frequency words with write the room and unscramble sentence activities. Put your current vocabulary cards around the room, in heart shapes for fun, or work on number words with resource shown above.
Incorporate Read Alouds
Books to Love: Be You! by Peter H. Reynolds is all about self love and one of my favorite read alouds. I love how it provides such a great opportunity to talk about what students love about themselves. Speaking multiple languages, being brave in a new country, working hard in school, and helping their families always come up and are so important to celebrate. I Believe I Can by Keturah A. Bobo is another great option.
Play Bingo!
Although this isn’t a Valentine Bingo shown, you can make any Bingo game fun to play in February using heart shaped candies to mark the spots. Then you can let students eat them or take them home. Bonus- they have fun reading the conversation hearts candy! If you want to work on Valentine vocabulary, search for Valentine Bingo and your grade level on TPT.
Check out these resources!
Click on any of the images below for a link to TPT to read more about them.
Other helpful blog posts!
Finally, come find me on Instagram where I’l share more about these ideas and any others I come across. Happy Teaching!
Beth
