Happy Mathentine’s Day!
Normally for Valentine’s Day, I mark the occasion by posting a couple fun links for students to explore, but this year I found some cute and fun math Valentine’s Day cards (“Mathentines”) online and decided to hand those out with some Smarties as students walked in.
Before I show the Valentine’s Day cards, here are the two links I’ve used:
DESMOS “Math-O-grams” -> Desmos created six different awesome Valentine’s Day themed graphs related to Sierpinski’s triangle fractal, trigonometry, absolute value graphs, and more. Most have sliders to help see the image or animation.
NUMBERPHILE’S Youtube video on “Amicable Numbers” -> This brief video (under 4 minutes) explains what amicable numbers are and how humans in the past have used them to express their love to one another.
This is what these link postings look like on my Google Classroom stream:
Texas Instruments (TI) has been active on Facebook posting various educational resources and ideas, and when I saw their Mathentine’s, I knew I needed to hand them out. They also had a well-designed Valentine’s Day bulletin board resource which I didn’t get around to printing out.
TI came up with some great math puns for their cards this year and the students seemed to really enjoy them! What I loved the most about them was that each math pun had a graphical image that went with it - so for example, the card that said “You’re secant to none” had a graph of a secant line.
CLICK HERE for a PDF version of the TI-84 Mathentine’s Day cards.
CLICK HERE for a PDF version of the TI-NSpire Mathentine’s Day cards.
CLICK HERE for a PDF version of the TI Valentine’s Day bulletin board.
I wanted to print these out on white cardstock paper to make them more durable, but my printer got jammed when I tried, so I ended up using regular printer paper. I tape a Valentine’s themed Smartie’s roll to the back of each card (this was the most time-consuming part).
I also found another set of cute math Valentine’s created by a teacher in the AP Pre-Calculus teacher Facebook group. Her cards were great as well, so I ended up making both and mixing them up, so some students got the TI cards and some got her cards. My AP Calculus students got one of each since there are fewer of them than there are of Algebra II students.
These are some of the cards the teacher created and shared:
HERE is a PDF of all of her card designs. I didn’t use the ones specifically related to AP Pre-Calculus, but the other ten designs were relevant to my classes and well-designed.
Next year I might make some with Hersey’s kisses and some with Smarties, because I’m not sure everyone loves Smarties. This way they can pick the type they prefer. There are a LOT of Valentine’s Day activities and ideas out there, but I needed one that took basically zero class time (we need to catch up with the curriculum after four snow days so far this year) and ideally was math related, and everything above met those requirements. Enjoy!
ALSO - here’s a PDF I found on my computer. It is a collection of random Valentine’s that could be printed and cut out.