Middle School Math Valentine's Day Activities
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, but you can do it in a fun and engaging way.
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 students to practice and review solving equations. Students connect equations with the same solution and form a heart. Perfect for your middle school math students on Valentine's Day.
Heart Area Critical Thinking
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 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 them 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.
- If you want to stretch the activity even further, have them determine how many tablespoons of frosting they will need. This can be calculated by converting cubic centimeters into tablespoons.
- On Valentine's day, bring heart cookies 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.
Check out these fun coloring worksheets to keep your students working on math while celebrating the holiday. These are great because they are no prep and perfect to keep your students engaged are reviewing essential skills.
In this Exponential Love Valentine's Day activity students will practice the exponent properties while coloring a fun conversation hearts coloring page.
- 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?