Valentines for EveryBUGgy!

How can I help your class do good deeds?
Read below and go help somebuggy!

It's another snow day for me!  We had our weekend, then one day of staff development, then three snow days, and we will have school for one day tomorrow.  Oh my.... I thought this article was pretty accurate.  I may be starting to panic about our testing because we are WAY behind at this point...

{5 Reasons Schools Hate Snow Days}

But on to something a little more FUN.

Valentine's Day is a holiday I can certainly get on board with at school.  It's such a friendly holiday.  Unlike Halloween, the kids come in somewhat normal at the beginning of the day.  They aren't dressed as some creepy or devil-ish character or acting like crazy children...until they have sugar, but we save that for the end.  Everything is themed in showing love and sharing kindness.  I wish we had more events like this.

I'll admit, valentines have gotten completely out of hand.  Remember when the biggest decision was going to the store and picking your one box of valentines to write on and fold?  The super cool kids would put a piece of chocolate on theirs and we would all be jealous, but so happy they did it at the same time.  Now if someone doesn't bring candy, the rest of the kids act like they made some huge VDay faux pas.

Anywho...here's my plan for this year.  

This year, I'm trying really hard to focus on kindness in my classroom, so I decided to do something a little different.  The other day we watched this awesome video:

Isn't that great?  I want to do a follow up activity, so I came up with this idea for Valentine's Day...

These are so cute, right?  There are tons of bug valentine ideas on Pinterest as well- so if you follow {this link} it will take you to them so that you can create your own variation.  But what does that have to do with kindness, you ask?  Let me explain...

Well... what if all your Love Bugs ESCAPED and found their way to your students' desks?  Then they all got bit and had to pass on a good deed to "somebuggy" that day?  You can be as dramatic as you want... I'll probably go full speed ahead.

This is a super easy project!  Since I've been sitting around my house working hard for 3 snow days, I went ahead and put my Love Bugs together.  I used fruit cups.  I like to balance all the Valentine's Day sugar with fruit....in jell-o.

Next, gather the usual suspects... glue gun, googly eyes...you know.

Glue your googly eyes on (I used the hot glue gun) and then twist those pipe cleaners around and glue onto the top.  Grab that permanent marker and draw on a big friendly love bug smile.  I added dots because bugs have dots, right?

Then I cut out my labels and taped (I was done with the glue) them to the bottom of the cup.

I love how they turned out and I'm so excited to do this in class!

I made a poster to project onto the board when my students come in that morning and all the bugs are on their desk.  I'll talk about it to explain what their job will be for the day.  At the end of the day, we will complete a short writing activity to share what they did for "somebuggy".  

In order to spread the love, I'm putting this up on {TpT} for just $1.25.  It includes the "poster" to display in the morning, printable tags for your bugs, a graphic organizer for writing about their good deed, and writing paper (color and b&w) for the final draft.  Please leave some feedback and let me know how it works in your classroom!

Yay!  I'm excited!

**Just when I was thinking "Someone should really have a linky party for this!... I found one!  I'm linking up with {A Chocolate Dudley}, so hop over there and find all kinds of Valentine's Day ideas!!**

            

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