Visual Valentine's Vocabulary

Hi everybody, this is Jace from Mr. Elementary and I have a fun, FREE Valentine’s Day vocabulary resource to share with you today. 

Teaching vocabulary around the topic you’re studying, in this case Valentine’s Day, empowers your students by helping them express themselves in greater depth and detail.  It also boosts their comprehension in all of the reading and writing activities you’ll most likely be doing around the topic. 

I created this set of Visual Valentine’sDay Vocabulary Cards to help boost students vocabulary around all of the Valentine’s Day activities you may be doing.  The resource includes both filled out and blank vocabulary cards as well as enlarged cards to hang on a word wall.  The pictures, definitions, and sentences were especially helpful for my ELL students to understand the vocabulary.

Here’s a list of ways you could use these cards in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day.  If you really wanted to make life easy on yourself you could probably plan your whole Valentine’s Day party around them!  (If you end up doing that I’d love to hear how it goes.)

• Create Valentine’s Day Cards: Hang the word wall cards up for students to refer to during writing activities about Valentine’s Day.  Part of my Valentine’s Day party was always making cards and I loved to have the vocabulary up on the wall for students to use and experiment with.  I would just spread out some pieces of Valentine’s Day colored paper on a table, let students pick one and then let them start creating.  I always kept a box of scrap construction paper in my room for students to dig through.  At first I tried to guide my class in making a card but I found it was much more enjoyable for all of us when I gave them the freedom to create their own.
• Valentine Charades: Break your class into teams and give each team several cards from the deck.  They can use the filled out cards or add more vocabulary of their own using the blank cards.  Have teams act out the words for each other to guess.
• Valentine Pictionary: Break the class into teams and let them draw representations of the Valentine vocabulary for their teams to guess.
• Valentine Memory Matching Game:  If you anticipate the class getting a little crazy from sugar overload this might be a good option to quiet them down.  To play just print the cards out single sided. Then either cut them out or have the students cut them.  Place students into groups of 2 or more and place all of their cards in rows face down.  They can play Valentine Vocabulary Memory by matching the side of the card with the word and picture on it with the side that has the definition and sentence.

One last bonus with these cards is that you can even use them as your Valentine for each of the students in the class.  I provided 2 options for a box to store them in and one says, “To: ________ From: __________”  You could (or you could have a parent helper) cut them out and have them waiting for students on their desks when they walk in in the morning.  Tell them they’ll be doing fun activities with them all day and that they’ll get to take them home at the end of the day!

If you’d like to download this set of Valentine’s Day Vocabulary Cards just click this link.  Also feel free to check out my blog at www.mrelementary.com for many more tips, tricks and resources on teaching vocabulary!