Middle School Math Valentine's Day Activities
Kids (even older kids) love holidays! In the words of my child, "I'm excited for this holiday to be over so we can celebrate the next holiday." Valentine's day in middle school math can be just as exciting. You want to make sure to continue learning the math curriculum, and practicting math skills, but you can do it in a fun and engaging way.
Check out these 5 fun activities for the Valentine's Day holiday.
Heart Puzzle for Solving Equations
This fun heart algebraic equations puzzle focuses on solving equations with the distributive property and integers. A perfect way for your middle school math students to practice and review solving equations. Once students calculate the correct answer to the math problems they connect the solution and equation to form a heart.
Works great in math centers, small groups, or independent work. A great activity for your middle school students on Valentine's Day.
Heart Area Critical Thinking
Incorporate this ciritcal thinking Valentine's Day math activity into your lesson plans. Draw this heart on the board and have your students determine the area of the heart. Students should justify their work. You can have students present the different ways that they determined the area, and as a class discuss how they are different and how they are the same.
The Perfect Sugar Cookie - A fun way to incorporate area and volume
If you're ambitious as a teacher you can frost sugar cookies...with math. Students will love this activity.
To frost sugar cookies using area and volume complete the following:
- Give the above heart area problem to your middle school students the day before Valentine's day. Use the approximate dimensions of the sugar cookies you will be frosting. Have them determine the area of the heart.
- After they have determined the area, have your middle schoolers calculate how much frosting is needed to make the perfect sugar cookie. They can determine the volume of frosting by calculating the product of the area of the base and the depth of the frosting they think will make the best cookie. You can tell them this formula, or let them figure it out. I always prefer letting them figure it out.
- As an added challenge, have your students determine how many tablespoons of frosting they will need. This can be calculated by converting cubic centimeters into tablespoons.
- On Valentine's day, bring cookies in the shape of large hearts for them to frost. Bring a tablespoon and have them scoop out their pre-determined amount of frosting to give themselves the perfect sugar cookie.
Engaging Valentine's Day Math Worksheets
Check out these fun math activities and coloring worksheets to keep your middle schoolers working on math while celebrating the holiday. This is a great way to keep your middle school students engaged and reviewing essential skills. An answer key is also included.
In this Exponential Love Valentine's Day activity students will practice the exponent properties while coloring a fun conversation hearts coloring page. This is a fun way for your eighth graders to practice their fluency with the exponent rules.
Conversation Hearts for Estimation and Probability
Fill a cylindrical jar with conversation hearts and have your students estimate the quantity. Have conversations with your students how they can use math to more accurately estimate. Don't tell them, just ask guided questions. (Find the volume of the cylinder in terms of candy hearts.)
Conversation hearts are a perfect way to incorporate Valentine's day in your class with probability. Here are some questions you could use, but the options are limitless. You can take this as deep or as simple as you need to.
- If there are 5 blue out of 20 conversation hearts, what is the probability of picking one blue?
- What about picking two blues with replacing the first heart?
- What about picking two blues without replacing the first heart?
- Give every student their own pack of conversation hearts and have the students compare probabilities with their boxes.
- How does the sample size of their box compare to the data of the whole group?
In Conclusion
These fun activities for Valentine's day are sure to engage your middle school math students. From Valentine's Day math worksheets, holiday-themed math puzzles, decorating valentine cookies and estimating candy probability. These activities are a great way to keep your middle schoolers engaged and better than handing them a worksheet with irrelevant word problems.
Happy Valentine's Day :)
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