This Valentine’s Day, let’s go beyond candy and cards with social emotional learning read alouds and activities that spotlight kindness, friendship, cooperation, and collaboration.

And better yet, let’s celebrate for a whole week with fun-filled literacy centers, poetry, crafts, and more! AND, let’s make sure it’s all low-prep or NO-PREP and absolutely stress-free! Ready?

The Biggest Valentine Ever by Steven Kroll is a classroom favourite, and for good reason! This story naturally blends social-emotional learning examples and themes into a sweet story, providing loads of opportunity for extension activities…

After reading, pose some of the discussion questions (provided👆) to generate conversation about dealing with difficult emotions and what it means to be a good friend. Students can then complete the cut and paste sorting activity identifying positive and negative friendship behaviors.

Next up is my favorite: a collaborative poster all about collaboration! What better way to celebrate friendship and teamwork?!

Finally, a Valentine card with a twist! 💌 It looks like a Valentine’s Day card but really it’s an SEL activity in disguise 😉 Students will put their emotional intelligence to the test as they look closely at pictures of children and try to decipher how they might be feeling.

Inside the “card”, they will reflect on one way they are a good friend.

There are so many literacy centers out there but these have been a favorite of my students year after year. Students will build essential skills like reading, writing, poetry, CVC words, synonyms, sight words, beginning & end sounds, and MORE, without even knowing it 🥳

There are 10 centers included (with tons of additional differentiation) from word work and writing, to write the room and pocket chart poetry, so despite the excitement and sugar high, students will be busy and engaged all. week. long. 🙌

What’s a Fun With Firsties blog post with some FREEBIES?! This cute little Box of Love craft doubles as a super simple bulletin board display.

But that’s not all! 🤯 This free resource also comes with Valentine math worksheets and activity pages for morning work, early finishers, or just for fun!

(Click any image above to download)

Last but not least, the students in our school were fascinated with this interactive bulletin board display last year. It shows the word LOVE in 14 different languages.

I loved watching the kiddos (and even staff!) having little challenges with one another to see if they could guess which language each card displayed, then they’d lift the flap to see if they got it right!

A particular favourite was the custom braille card. We have some visually impaired students at our school so the vision teacher created a braille label that I stuck on the custom card (you can see my finger touching the clear braille sticker above).

The students loved walking by and getting a little tactile experience as they “read” the braille word on their way to class…better yet, our visually-impaired students were feeling like rockstars because everyone got to experience how challenging it was to “read” those little dots, and were so impressed that these students had such a cool skill. It really pumped their tires 💕

And the inclusivity continues with a sweet and simple bulletin board craft all about what love means or looks like to each individual child.

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That wraps it up!

What are some of your favourite Valentine activities that you do year after year? Any read alouds that you just can’t skip? Share them with me in the comments below!

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Here are some images so you can PIN 📌 any of the ideas in this post for later…