14 Valentine’s Day Center Ideas for Kindergarten (with 2 FREEBIES!)

Valentine’s Day is the perfect opportunity to reinforce friendship, kindness and love in a Kindergarten classroom! Scroll through this post if you need ideas for Valentine’s day centers for Kindergarten that will keep your students busy and engaged while also strengthening their fine motor, literacy and math skills!

1. Build & Trace Valentine’s Day Words

Snap cubes are always popular with students and a great way to work on developing the finger muscles needed for holding and writing with a pencil! Simply set out these mats with snap cubes and have students build the images and trace the word at the bottom with a dry erase marker to extra printing practice!

All of the printables (except for the freebies of course) shown in this blog post are in this pack: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kindergarten-Valentines-Day-Centres-Literacy-Math-Fine-Motor-More-12807533

2. Uppercase & Lowercase Tracing

In Kindergarten, most students need practice with letter formation all year long! This is the same format as all of my other mats in the new season & holiday series (fall, Halloween, winter, Christmas). Simply swap out/add to your writing or dry erase centre 🙂

3. Valentine Words: Dab and Read

A simple, no-prep way to work on letter formation (without a pencil!) Students use the bingo dabbers (small stamps work too!), start at the image and then dab the dots to form the letter. There is a colour version with no “Name:” that you can use with loose parts instead of bingo dabbers as well!

4. Valentine’s Day Word Chart & Mini Book

My students love these word charts and mini books so I make them for every holiday/season! I simply put the word charts out with blank paper or booklets and have students draw and write a sentence or write a story using some of the words!

The booklet comes in 3 levels so it’s easy to differentiate!

5. Pick & Build Heart Words

Isn’t Valentine’s Day the perfect opportunity to reinforce the heart words you’ve been teaching? I included the words in the UFLI Scope & Sequence (Lessons 1-48) but if you are focusing on different irregular words you can simply use the included editable PowerPoint file to add your own words!

Students pick 3 words, place it on the gray boxes and build the word with magnetic letters!

6. Mailing CVC Words: Say & Encode

This is one of my favourites from this pack! This activity works on encoding skills and I’m excited to work with my youngest on this one in a few weeks to as I think this will be a just right guided activity for him! Students simply say the word, identify and find the three letters that make the word and then flip the stamp up to check their answers.

Now let’s move on to some math activities!

7. Trace & Build: Decorating Heart Cookies

Play dough/loose parts centres are always popular with my students so I try to include it whenever I can! I set these cards out with play dough and some Valentine’s Day loose parts (I used small pom poms, heart beads, heart rhinestones and cut up pipe cleaners).

9. Baking Valentine Cookies

Both my students and my own kids love anything that includes a dramatic play element and this centre and the next one do just that!

Students will work on 1:1 correspondance and visual discrimination while building the cookie orders❤️

10. Build a Heart Shaped Pizza!

This format (first introduced as Witch’s Brew during Halloween) is always a hit! I kept it simple this time with just the three ingredients (but I did include regular circle pepperoni, ham, pineapple and red onion options in case you want to switch up the toppings or include more toppings!). For the heart shaped pepperoni I used some heart shaped foam pieces I had in my Valentine bin (I think they were from Dollarama or Dollar Tree years ago), for the olives I just grabbed a handful of black pony beads and for the green peppers I cut up some green pipe cleaners and curved them with my hand so they look more like slices of green pepper😉

To play students simply pick a card from each pile, and then follow the cards to add that many toppings to the pizza!

11. Count & Stack Candy Hearts (Freebie)

For this simple activity, students read the number on each heart and stack that many candy hearts on top of it! This one is really fun and surprisingly tricky especially when you get to the bigger numbers! A fun way to work on number recognition, 1:1 correspondence and fine motor skills!

There are two versions included since I originally couldn’t decide if I liked it with the clip art or without (I ended up going with the clip art one which is shown above) as well as B&W versions in case you prefer that. To grab it you can click here or on the image below!

12. Sorting Candy Hearts

This is a simple sorting mat that students can use to sort candy hearts by colour! I included two versions as I made a mat with purple first but then realized there are no purple candy hearts in my bag, but blue instead😝 I hope one of these mats work with the candy hearts you have! There is also a B&W version so if neither mats work for you you can colour them in yourself to match the colours you have!

These mats are also in the freebie above but here is the link again:

13. My Valentine’s Day Patterning Mini Book

I always have a few kids who are obsessed with mini books so I have try to have at least one mini book out at all times! Here is a Valentine’s Day themed version of my patterning mini books! Again, there are many options for easy differentiation!

14. Valentine’s Day Cookies: Measure & Record

Measure & Record is another centre that is always popular and it works on so many skills at once (non-standard measurement, fine motor, 1:1 correspondence, number formation). It’s a nice low prep centre too, simply cut out the cards and set them out with snap cubes and the recording sheet! If you want to switch it up, measuring them with candy hearts would be fun🩷

Again all of the printables shown in this pack are in my “Kindergarten Valentine’s Day Centres: Literacy, Math, Fine Motor & More!” pack on TPT. Click here or on the image below if you want to grab it to use in your classroom🥰

Still looking for more ideas? You can pick up FREE alphabet/CVC/sight word cards for a heart shaped play dough cookie activity, a FREE crossword Valentine to hand out to your students and see how I make a simple Valentine hat for students to decorate and wear on Valentine’s day from paper plates here: https://apinchofkinder.com/2020/02/february-2020/

I hope you found this round up helpful for your February planning!