Adding theme tasks into our students’ schedule can keep learning exciting, but it can make you go broke if you aren’t careful! Here are 8 different Valentine’s Day tasks that I made from $8 worth of materials from the dollar store. Best part… I still have materials left over to use in crafts or to personalize the tasks.
Below is what I bought at my local dollar store. I plan to use the red container in December for another sensory activity.
I mixed the pink and red packages of petals into the red bin. Then, I added in about 1/3 of the red foil shreds into the petals. With many of the tasks I created, I used the sensory bin to hide the materials in. My kiddos LOVE finding their materials in the sensory bin!
I took the different colored hearts and wrote our sight words on them with a black sharpie. Then, I wrote the sight words on index cards. Students have to find the hearts, read the sight word and then match it to the correct card.
Once the hearts have all been found, you could have the student alphabetize the words to add in an extra challenge.
I also used the hearts to write letters on them. I had more than enough for a set of upper case and lowercase letters. I wrote the letters on the hearts in a ABCABC pattern, so we can also sneak in some extra patterning practice.
For my students who need more varied practice with sorting, I made this sort. Students have to find the hearts in the sensory bucket and sort them by shiny or not shiny.
For math practice, I also used the different sized hearts to make a sizing sort. To help students generalize, you could also make a set with different words such as biggest, smallest, big, bigger, biggest, etc. I also mounted the hearts on different sized construction paper to help students cue in to the different sizes.
Strong understanding of number concepts is important for future life skills, so I also made 2 different counting and sets tasks. In the first one, students need to count the set of hearts and match them to the number. I used the heart necklaces to make this task. As a bonus, you could also use these heart strings to work on more or less. You could also take the numbers away and have students order the strings from least to greatest.
I also wanted a number sequencing task, so I used the hearts again and made a counting by fives task. You could easily make this tailored to your students and do counting by ones, twos, tens, etc.
