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Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our speech and language friends! Ready or not…the holiday of love is upon us! If you aren’t feeling the love, don’t worry. We have a whole line up of ridiculously easy Valentine’s Day speech and language activities to make your sessions extra sweet. Be sure to instantly download our Valentine’s Day Speech Articulation Vocalic /R/ Smash Mats for a no prep, print and go activity for FREE!
Valentine’s Day Themed Speech & Language Activities
- Make It Monday
- Take A Trip Tuesday
- Water Wednesday
- Thinking Thursday
- Foodie Friday
- Scavenger Hunt Saturday
- Sensory Sunday
Make It Monday
First up for our fun week of Valentine’s Day speech and language activities, we have an adorable and versatile “blowing kisses” craft. All you will need is a pair of scissors, a glue stick, pink or red construction paper, heart sticks (or cut out your own hearts), and a picture of your little Valentine!
To get just the right angle for the picture, have your children or student pretend to blow a kiss and snap a profile picture. Print the photo in black and white or in color, but be sure to cut around the outline of the child. Once cut out, glue the picture onto the construction paper.
We used heart foam stickers as our heart kisses, but you could always cut out your own for this craft. Arrange the hearts on the page until filled!
I did this same activity with my speech students for Valentine’s Day too! I snapped a quick picture of each student the week prior to the holiday so I had the background prepped ahead of time. The only other variation was I wrote my students’ target speech sounds on each heart. They had to practice their word then received a heart to place on their background.
This was such a cute and easy Valentine’s Day speech craft! Plus my students were super pumped to take their finished activity home and continue practicing their target speech sounds!
Take A Trip Tuesday
For our special Valentine’s Day trip, we decided to deliver valentines to our friends and family! My son and Mandy’s daughter made valentines for their classmates and brought them to school to hand deliver. In addition, we made cards for our neighbors too!
From picking out valentines at the store or hand making cards, kids are exposed to a variety of vocabulary! We love any chance we can get when our kids are able to engage in social interactions with family, friends, and neighbors!
At both of our schools, Mandy and I support our students with the functional language necessary to exchange valentines. See the list below to help increase your speech students use of Valentine’s Day themed language while handing out their cards to classmates!
- “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
- “Here you go.”
- “Thank you!”
- “I like this card.”
- “This is my card.”
- “My cards are _______.”
- “Your cards look ______.”
- “Put card in here.”
- “Pass cards out.”
- “All done.”
Water Wednesday
This week’s Valentine’s Day water activity is more of a science experiment, but a ridiculously easy one! Grab some conversation candy hearts, any carbonated drink, and a drinking glass.
Fill the drinking glass 3/4 full then slowly drop in 7-8 conversation candy hearts. Then get ready! Your candy hearts will dance!
My son loved watching the hearts sink to the bottom then dance to the top. We talked about how the carbonation lifts the hearts from the underside of the candy. Once the bubbles pop underneath the candy hearts, they fall back down to the bottom of the glass giving the illusion of a fun candy heart dance!
At school, I modified this Valentine’s Day activity for my older elementary students during a large group speech and language activity. Instead of just one glass of carbonated water or soda, I set up three different liquids: tap water, soda, and vinegar. We used these free candy heart science experiment worksheets by Curriculum Castle to review all of the materials and formulate basic predictions.
Each student had the opportunity to drop a candy heart into the glasses. We then took some time to observe the candy hearts in each cup. My students were able to compare what they saw to what they predicted. Such a cool and easy way to target some high level language skills with a Valentine’s Day theme!
Thinking Thursday
For this week’s themed book, we choose a sweet story LOADED with /r/ target words! We read “The Day It Rained Hearts” by Felicia Bond. There are tons of great vocalic /r/ and initial /r/ words throughout the story for an easy auditory bombardment or structured reading for your Valentine’s Day speech activities. Check out the word list below to help target /r/ during your speech sessions this week!
/R/ Word List from “The Day It Rained Hearts”
- Rained
- Hearts
- Started
- Cornelia
- Another
- Hard
- Work
- Perfect
- Card
- Different
- Right
- Friends
- More
- Thread
- Center
- Largest
- Circles
- Carefully
- Arranged
- Patterns
- Color
- Receive
- Never
- Matter
- Year
- Other
- Strung
- Person
- Paper
To continue with the theme, we have our very own Free Vocalic /R/ Smash Mats to target the following sounds: /AIR/, /AR/, /ER/, /EAR/, /IRE/, /OR/, and mixed pages. Pair these with the Valentine’s Day book above or use as a no prep stand alone speech activity. For those of you with students targeting /r/ or gliding in your speech sessions, this is the perfect Valentine’s Day book and activity! Did we mention these smash mats were free? 😉❤️
Foodie Friday
We kept things delicious and simple for our Valentine’s Day themed foodie Friday. We decided to go with “Cupid Chow” (aka regular puppy chow with extra sweetness!). Just make regular puppy chow per the recipe found here on Chex.com then get creative and add whatever red and pink candies you would like!
We went with red and pink pearl sprinkles plus some red and pink peanut M&Ms. The best part about this recipe is you can really do whatever you want to add that extra Valentine’s Day flare. Trust us…it will get eaten!
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do this at our schools due to the peanut butter and allergies. However, there is a peanut butter free recipe too! Click here to check that out to modify this activity and then share some Valentine’s Day Cupid Chow with your speech and language students!
Scavenger Hunt Saturday
We have another vocabulary scavenger hunt for this week and guess what??? It is completely free in our TPT store! This was one of our very first products when we started our store one year ago and we love that we can continue to share this Valentine’s Day speech and language activity with you for free!
Target vocabulary words include: Card, Ring, Bouquet of Flowers, Mailbox, Envelope, Hearts, Rose, Candy Hearts, Cupcake, Box of Chocolates, Arrow, Present, Heart Balloon, & Heart Flower. Print and laminate the vocabulary cards to hide around the classroom or place into a sensory bin. Use the sentence strip visual to create 4-5 word utterances.
Print the no-prep black and white coloring page to send as homework or use during a session to review the Valentine’s Day vocabulary concepts. Lastly, use the pretend magnifying glasses to search for the vocabulary words within a fun, colorful picture scene. Great way to target spatial prepositions too!
Sensory Sunday
For our Valentine’s Day speech and language sensory activity, we went with a sensory bag versus a sensory bin. We love sensory bags because they can be used over and over again! All you need is clear hair gel, a large plastic baggie, red and pink buttons (or other small manipulatives), a black marker, and white piece of paper…plus a willing, active, and excited participant!
Side note…if you plan on using these sensory bins with busy hands in your speech rooms, feel free to reinforce the baggie with duct or electric tape to avoid breaking the seal top. I often tape the sensory bag down on my speech table or student’s desk by cover the top of the bag.
Here is how we made our “Fill The Heart” sensory bag. Fill the plastic baggie with a few tablespoons of hair gel. Then place the desired number of buttons into the bag and seal the top. (Feel free to reinforce the top of the bag with duct tape!) Then draw a heart on a white piece of paper and lay the baggie on top of the paper. Have your own kiddo or students push the buttons to fill the heart.
There is so many awesome core words you can target during this Valentine’s Day sensory experience. Model the following words while filling the heart: push, move, in, out, full, empty, red, pink, big, small, smooth, slide, help, and so many more!
We hope you have enjoyed this extra sweet week full of Valentine’s Day speech and language activities! We had so much fun doing these activities with both our speech and language students as well as our own kids. Planning on trying one of these ideas out this week? Be sure to leave us a comment below or tag us on Instagram to let us know how it goes!
Happy Valentine’s Day, SLPs!
Kate & Mandy
Talking Mama Bears
