An Academic Twist on Valentines
Joyce Wan’s We Belong Together is a wonderful book highlighting items that “belong together” like milk and cookies, peanut butter and jelly, and eggs and bacon.
Let’s merge this theme with curriculum to create Academic Valentines!
Examples
We’ll ask students to look at an academic topic, searching for ideas that go together “like peanut butter and jelly.” Here are some examples:
Social Studies
- You’re the Zeus to my Hera
- You’re the democracy to my Athens
- You’re the Sphinx to my Giza
- You’re the Lewis to my Clark
- You’re the Caesar Augustus to my Pax Romana
Science
- You’re the O to my H2
- You’re the Phobos to my Deimos
- You’re the electrons to my capacitor
- You’re the Alfred Wegener to my plate tectonics.
- You’re the quarks to my protons.
Math
- You’re the c2 to my a2 + b2
- You’re the divisor to my quotient.
- You’re the origin to my coordinate plane.
- You’re the vertex to my adjacent angles.
- You’re the rise to my run.
Adding On
These sentences go on the front of the card with an illustration. Here’s the cover for my Phobos and Deimos card:
On the inside, students write an explanation of the relationship between the two items. Here is where you can set high academic expectations for your fun Valentine activity. Just because students have made something cute, don’t let them get away with shallow thinking. It’s okay to say “I think you can do more here, Jimmy” even with a fun, holiday task.
Here’s my “fun facts” on the inside:
Phobos and Deimos go together because they are Mars’ only moons. Plus, they were discovered within a week of each other in August of 1877. Phobos and Deimos are Fear and Terror from Greek mythology. Finally, both moons are tidally locked, meaning that they always point the same face to Mars, much like Earth’s moon.
Integrate this with any art techniques you use, or let your students use software to create professional-looking cards. Post them or let kids send them to another teacher at school for fun surprises.
If you try this with your class, let me know what they come up with: ian@byrdseed.com! I’m sure they’ll take it in some awesome and unexpected directions.