Valentine’s Day – Romantically Themed ESL Activities

Oh, Valentine’s Day, love it or hate it, there sure is plenty to talk about.  Here is a selection of romantically themed material you could use leading up to and on the big day.

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Teaching Online

You can find online Valentine’s Day activities at our online-focused site LearnHip.com.

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These love and marriage-themed conversation questions are a good way to get the class discussing some of the themes of Valentine’s Day and practising any related new vocabulary they have recently learned. For more sets of themed conversation, cards see our page of conversation questions.

This idiom worksheet contains a few idioms that might be used when talking about the themes of love and romance. For more idiom worksheets see our page of mixed up idioms.

We also have a Valentine’s Day Scatter Sheet. Scatter sheets are a simple exercise to get students describing and hopefully learning some new vocabulary around a theme. You can learn more about how to use them on this page.

Finally, here is a Valentine’s themed collaborative crossword to give learners some practise in describing vocabulary and ‘talking around’ a word, a valuable skill for learners of all abilities. See Collaborative Crosswords for more information and lots of other crosswords.

• Love and Marriage conversation questions
• Love and Romance Idioms
• Valentine’s Day Scatter Sheet
• Collaborative Crossword – Love and Romance

Example Valentines’s day lesson

Here is one way of using this material for a Valentine’s Day lesson.

As a warmer and to introduce the theme we’ll start with a little collocation quiz. Write on the board the following:

true _____

first _____

_____ song

_____ affair

______ life

See if the learners can deduce what the missing word is for each collocation (love).

Then do a second one.

____ache

____ attack

____break

____beat

See if the class can work out the second missing word (heart). Ask them to now guess the theme of the lesson.

Now do a spontaneous scatter sheet exercise. Put the heading of Valentine’s day at the top of the board and elicit from the learners any words they can think of associated with Valentine’s Day. Write these randomly on the board. The result might look something like this.

When you have a nice collection of words, go around the class asking each student to describe one of the words on the board without saying the actual word. The other learners can call out the answer if they think they know what the word is. As each word is correctly defined cross out or circle each item of vocabulary until all the words have been removed.

Now give each student a copy of the Love & Marriage vocabulary and idioms worksheet from our conversation classes book and have students work through it with a partner.

Finally give groups of 3 to 5 learners a shuffled deck of the accompanying conversation cards. Put them face down on the table. In turn, learners turn over the top card, read the question and then discuss the question in their groups.

Finally, when the group discussions are over. Go through each of the questions and ask the class if there were any interesting stories, observations, etc. which came up in their discussions.

For homework you could ask them to write a short story using as much of the new vocabulary as they can.