Valentine’s Day Math Activities for the Classroom

Are you looking for Valentine’s Day math activities for your upper elementary classroom?

Here are some of my favorite Valentine’s Day math activities for upper elementary that are sure to excite your students and keep them engaged in learning during the holiday season.

Valentine’s Day Math Project Based Learning

Incorporating math skills into Valentine’s Day-themed projects is a great way to keep kids engaged in learning during the excitement of a holiday!

I love using project-based learning units with students! For Valentine’s Day, try incorporating the theme of sweet treats or candy into a project-based learning unit.

I focused a week worth of Valentine’s Day math activities around the theme of cake pops. Cake pops are super fun treats and kids love the bite-sized, colorful sweets!

Cake Pop Cafe PBL Steps

For this unit I have students work to create a cake pop cafe. I start by having them choose a business name and location. Then, they create a logo and design the cafe building. These beginning steps give kids ownership of the project. It also makes each project unique and individualized to each student.

Next, students have to choose cake pop flavor combinations to sell in their cake pop cafe. We discuss popular flavor combinations and unique flavor combinations, and the pros and cons of both. I have kids choose several cake flavors and several icing flavors. Then, I have them determine the number of possible combinations that could be made with those choices. Kids can draw a tree diagram or make a list of all the possibilities.

Once kids have decided on their flavors, they need to find a recipe. They will scale the recipe up to make multiple batches. For this step, kids can use repeated addition or multiplication to increase the quantity of each ingredient in the scaled-up recipe.

When the students know how much of each ingredient they need, it is time to go shopping for ingredients. You can create a price list or have kids look for prices online for the ingredients they need. Students will need to add decimals to get the total cost of all the ingredients they will need.

There are many steps involved in the cake pop creation process. I have students make a schedule showing the elapsed time from start to finish using the time it takes for each step of the recipe.

Finally, I have each student create a menu for their cake pop cafe. The menu will show cake pop flavors, additional menu items, beverages, special orders, and prices for everything.

As extensions, you can have kids practice buying from their classmates’ cake pop cafes to practice adding decimals. You could also have students create word problems about the items on their cake pop cafe menu.

While this project is not specifically focused on Valentine’s Day, sweets and baked goods are always popular for Valentine’s Day and tie in nicely to the holiday mood!

If this Valentine’s Day math project-based learning activity sounds fun, and you would like to grab the whole ready-to-go unit, you can CLICK HERE or on the image below.

Valentine’s Day Math Puzzles

A fun way to start math class is with a series of math picture puzzles. I created a set of 10 Valentine’s Day math-themed puzzles to use in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day.

Kids love puzzles and get excited to find the value of each object in the puzzles. It is a high interest way to get kids excited about math class each day.

These Valentine’s Day math puzzles make great math warm-ups or can be printed and put in a math center.

These puzzles are a great way to incorporate problem-solving, pre-algebra skills, variables, and solving equations into your Valentine’s Day math activities.

Grab the Valentine’s Day math puzzles HERE.

Conversation Heart Math

Nothing says “Valentine’s Day” more than the traditional conversation heart candy!

Grab some boxes of conversation hearts and use them to do some fun math activities with your students.

You can have students graph the colors they find in a box of conversation hearts, determine data landmarks like maximum, minimum, and mode, calculate the average number of letters on a conversation heart, find the percentage of each color in the box, or measure items using conversation hearts.

There are so many possibilities!

I have some conversation heart math activities along with some other fun Valentine’s Day math activities together in a Valentine’s Day math activity pack that you can grab HERE.

Velentine’s Day Math Color by Number

Most upper elementary students love coloring and holidays are a great time to incorporate fun color by number practice pages.

Look for color by number sheets that focus on a skill you are currently working on, a skill recently taught, or a math skill your kids need a little extra practice with.

Your students will get the practice they need in a fun and colorful way!

This set of 4 Valentine’s Day math color by number worksheets focuses on the skills of multiplication, division, order of operations, and reducing fractions. Perfect for upper elementary students!

Math Fact Mystery Picture (Free)

Looking for a fun way for your students to practice their multiplication facts with a Valentine’s Day math activity? This FREE mystery picture activity will be perfect for you!

Kids go through the stack of multiplication fact cards answering each problem. On the bottom of each card, there is a color written.

Once they answer the problem on the card they color all the squares with that number the color shown on the card.

The picture is a mystery to them until the end. They will be excited to see the colorful heart appear once they finish going through all of the multiplication fact cards.

You can grab this FREE activity by clicking here or on the image below.

I hope this post has given you some ideas for Valentine’s Day math activities that you can use in your upper elementary classroom.