Looking for some resources for Valentine’s Day that are fun without giving up meaningful ELA instruction? This collection of Valentine’s Day blog posts, classroom activities, and middle school ELA resources will help you celebrate the holiday while reviewing reading, writing, grammar, and figurative language skills.
Valentine’s Day in middle school. It is an odd holiday to navigate.
There are candy deliveries, flower fundraisers, classroom celebrations, and plenty of distractions.
Unfortunately, Valentine’s Day can also bring a whole range of feelings for middle school students. Some students love everything about it, while others would rather February 14th quietly pass them by.
Luckily, celebrating Valentine’s Day in middle school ELA doesn’t have to mean focusing on romance. Hearts, candy, friendship, creative writing, and the language we use to express ourselves provide plenty of inspiration for meaningful ELA activities.
Whether you have a full class period to fill or simply need something engaging to add to your regular lesson plans, here are some of our favorite Valentine’s Day blogs, activities, and resources for middle school ELA.
Looking for ideas before planning your Valentine’s Day lessons? Start with these blog posts!
4 Standards-Driven ELA Valentine’s Day Activities
Find four ready-to-use activities for practicing reading comprehension, figurative language, and parts of speech while keeping students engaged with Valentine’s Day themes.
Valentine’s Day Figurative Language Activities to Try in February
Explore low-prep ways to practice figurative language using Valentine-themed words, sorting challenges, collaborative activities, and digital resources.
Valentine’s Day Activities for Middle School Language Arts
Find creative ideas for digital escape rooms, fill-in-the-blank stories, figurative language Valentines, grammar review, and other activities you can use throughout Valentine’s Day week.
Valentine’s Day provides plenty of opportunities to get creative with ELA skills. Rather than planning activities that are only about the holiday, use Valentine’s Day as the theme for meaningful reading, writing, grammar, and language practice.
Put a middle school spin on the classic fill-in-the-blank story.
Pair students up and have them write an original Valentine-themed story. Once they’ve finished, students remove strategically selected words and replace them with labels such as noun, adjective, adverb, or verb.
Add another twist by requiring students to leave a blank for a mystery candy-heart message.
Then exchange stories and let another group supply the missing words before reading the finished—and probably ridiculous—story.
This is a fun way to reinforce parts of speech while also sneaking in some creative writing practice.
Give small groups a list of Valentine-themed words such as:
Then provide students with the types of figurative language you’ve been studying.
Their challenge is to create original Valentine-themed examples while making sure they use every type of figurative language on the list.
At the end of the activity, share some of the best examples with the class and ask students to identify which type of figurative language each group used.
Put the construction paper hearts to good use!
Divide students into small groups and challenge them to create as many Valentine-worthy examples of figurative language as possible within a set amount of time.
Students might create similes, metaphors, hyperbole, personification, alliteration, or other types of figurative language you’ve studied.
Transfer the best examples onto paper hearts and display them around your classroom or in the hallway.
Want to make it more challenging? Create a point system. Award points for using different types of figurative language, writing original examples, or even creating a rhyming Valentine poem that incorporates multiple figurative language devices.
Take the figurative language Valentine challenge one step further by asking students to create Valentines for teachers or other staff members in your school.
The catch?
Every Valentine needs to include figurative language.
After reviewing figurative language, assign each pair of students two different types of figurative language.
Each pair creates an original Valentine-themed example for each type on an index card.
Collect and mix up all the cards. The next day, write the figurative language categories on the board and challenge students to sort as many examples as possible within a set amount of time.
This is especially helpful because students aren’t just identifying teacher-created examples. They’re analyzing figurative language written by their classmates.
Sometimes the best activity before a holiday is one that you can simply share with students and let them run with.
Divide students into small groups and have them compete to complete a Valentine’s Day digital escape room.
Depending on the skills you want to review, students can work on reading comprehension, chronological order, plot structure, or figurative language while solving puzzles and uncovering hidden codes.
It’s an easy way to keep students working on important ELA skills when Valentine’s Day excitement makes a traditional lesson a little harder to pull off.
If you’re looking for ready-to-use resources for Valentine’s Day? Try some of these!
Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be all about romance, and it definitely doesn’t have to be a throwaway instructional day, and these resources for Valentine’s Day make it easy to try in your middle school classroom.
Use the holiday as an excuse to play with language, encourage creativity, review important skills, and give students opportunities to work together.
That’s the kind of Valentine’s Day we can fall in love with!
