Valentine’s Day is certainly a fun day to celebrate with your class – lots of happiness and good thoughts abound – and exchanging valentines in the classroom is a time-honored tradition. I wanted to share a couple ideas relating to passing out and collecting valentine cards by your students.

Each child will need some type of bag or box to collect the valentine cards. We’ve had children decorate a paper bag or box as a homework project. It’s really fun to see all the creative containers that get returned. One key instruction if you’re asking this to be done at home, is to make sure the child writes his name on the container! For littler ones, asking parents to include a photo of the child on the bag makes distributing cards much, much easier! If you’d rather do this project at school, white paper bags work well and can usually be found in bulk. Just provide gluesticks, doilies, ribbon, stickers, markers, colored paper (to make cut out hearts, of course!), stamps, or any other festive decorative item, and you’ll be good to go!

In the years we’ve exchanged valentines cards in the classroom, the students were asked the morning of our Valentine’s Day celebration to put their bags (or boxes), in a particular place, either along the tops of low bookcases, the counters, or around the perimeter of certain tables.  Students were then invited at certain times to pass their cards out. We did this throughout the day, allowing a few children to deliver their cards at a time. This both built excitement seeing the valentines being delivered little by little, but also allowed the majority of the class to continue about their business as if was a regular day. 🙂

Towards the end of the day we had a dedicated party, giving the children time to open their valentine “mail boxes” as part of the celebration. Exchanging valentines among your students can be a fun and memorable event. Having a plan for distributing and collecting them will make the day run that much more smoothly!