I like a themed activity as much as the next teacher, especially when we’re at that point in February where everyone could use something different. But I don’t want to lose an entire class period to an activity just because there are hearts on it.

If we’re doing something for Valentine’s Day in my math classroom, I still want students doing actual math. The theme can make it more fun. It doesn’t need to replace the content.

Here are a few ways to do that.

Use Valentine’s Day to Change the Context, Not the Math

One of the easiest options is to take a skill you’re already teaching and give it a Valentine’s Day spin.

• Working on percentages? Use candy hearts as data and have students calculate the percent of each color.
• Practicing operations with decimals? Build problems around the cost of Valentine’s cards, candy, flowers, or a class party.
• Working with fractions or ratios? There are plenty of ways to use Valentine’s Day data without changing what you’re actually supposed to be teaching that week.

You don’t need to stop your curriculum for Valentine’s Day. Sometimes changing the context is enough to make regular practice feel a little less regular.

Let Them Create the Problems

This is also a good time to hand some of the work over to students.

Give them a skill or a set of requirements and have them create their own Valentine’s-themed math problem. Then let them trade with a partner and solve each other’s. It’s simple, requires almost no prep, and creating a mathematically accurate problem usually requires more thinking than solving another page of them. And yes, you will probably end up with some absolutely ridiculous word problems.

That’s part of the fun.

If You Want Something Already Done…

I have an entire collection of Valentine’s Day Activities in my TPT store for the days when you want the Valentine’s Day fun without creating another thing yourself.

There are options for different skills and grade levels, so you can choose something that actually fits what your students are working on instead of squeezing a random Valentine’s activity into your lesson plans.

And if you want to go bigger, my Valentine’s Day Math Escape template lets you turn your own math content into a themed escape-style activity.

The Bottom Line

I’m all for doing something different for Valentine’s Day.

Put on the ridiculous math shirt. Break out the candy hearts. Give them an activity that’s a little more fun than what you’d normally do on a Wednesday. But they can have fun and do worthwhile math. Those two things were never mutually exclusive.

Lindsay