Are you looking for some fun Valentine’s Day school activities for your ESL students? It’s such a fun day to incorporate in your teaching! You can talk about the meaning of love with them, and all the things they love in their own lives. You can teach them about where this day comes from and what some traditions are. And of course, it’s a great vocabulary topic to cover with them!
I’ve come up with way too many things for this day of love already – I can’t actually do them all, because it’s just one day after all. But I thought I would share all of my ESL Valentine’s Day activities with you so that you can see if there’s anything you’d like to use. Get ready to write down all of the things!
Fun Valentine’s Day ESL activities for you
Here are my favorite Valentine’s Day activities for school. They include all the language skills: reading, listening, writing, speaking, and vocabulary practice as well. You can easily find resources online if you just google ‘Valentine’s Day’ and whatever you are looking for. Check out my tips!
Valentine’s Day writing activity
I love getting my students to write argumentative pieces, and for this writing activity they must argue why they love the people and things in their lives! Get them to first write down who they love, or what hobby they love, what place in the world they love, or even what foods. Then tell them to give as many reasons as possible to describe why they love these things or people so much. They must really persuade you..
I’ve come up with a super fun looking resource for this purpose, namely a flip book! It’s a fun booklet that contains the prompts I described above. When you print and fold the pages down on themselves, they become a booklet! I also made a digital version, which I hope we won’t have to use this year, because I like paper so much better! Check this resource out here.
Speaking activity for the day of love
Besides writing, I am the biggest fan of speaking the English language! I love getting my students to talk about things, and talking about what they love is a great topic! Get them to talk about their friends, their family, their home, and their hobbies: Why do they love these so much? I bet they can learn a lot from each other! You can ask them to discuss these prompts as a whole class, or you can make it a small group discussion activity. I will do the latter, since I love small group discussion so much. For this purpose, I have created a set of 12 discussion cards that are easily printed and distributed among small groups. Check out this resource here.
Valentine’s Day school activities: listening and reading
I felt like my students were a little low on practice of listening and reading skills lately. So I decided to find lots of cool videos and online articles for them to read about the origin of Valentine’s Day and other history surrounding it. You can find a lot if you just google “Valentine’s Day history”. I bundled what I found in a choice board with 6 options to choose from. This way, they’ll get a lot of content in a short amount of time plus they’ll be able to work on this independently. Check that choice board out here.
Vocabulary games for Valentine’s Day
Don’t have time to cover Valentine’s Day at all, because there’s no room in your curriculum? Well, maybe you have time for a short game instead? As I said, I don’t know what I’ll have time for, but I’ll definitely try to fit in some digital memory! (That’s all I have digitally..) Should you have time and the in-person teaching situation that I don’t have, give this dominoes game, and this printable memory game a chance!
I hope I’ve inspired you to do something fun for Valentine’s Day in your ESL lessons! Let me know if you have any questions!
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