Valentine's Day Semantics

Now that the (not so exciting) Super Bowl is over, we can focus on Valentine's Day. There are so many activities that you can do with the holiday - both sappy and otherwise.

On a basic level, you can have students make Valentine's Day cards, if the practice is allowed in your school/district. They'll probably make them for immediately family members in class, so you can use the opportunity to make V-Day cards for someone else... a sports hero, the president, a teacher. This is a great opportunity to work on sentence structure, pragmatics (socially appropriate greetings to write) and incorporate some phonemic awareness into the writing.

I decided on a semantically based activity for this V-Day. Here we have synonyms, antonyms (easy to do with a broken heart pattern), homophones and compound words.

Synonyms and antonyms are presented in 2 ways: 2 parts of a broken heart, which you can cut out and match, and a pair with one missing (robots for antonyms, dinosaurs for synonyms). Don't worry, there's an answer key for the missing pair!

Homophones are words that sounds the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Have students identify or match the definitions (a small box with a definition for each word is provided) and/or make sentences for the different definition.

Finally, the compound words are simply presented on a heart. Students can deconstruct the compound word, identify similar compounds and deconstruct the meaning based on its parts.

There are 154 synonyms and antonyms, 64 sets of homophones and 60 compound words!

You can find it on TpT or on Teachers Notebook.
Diana