Be My Valentine

Ah Valentine’s Day. The perennial discussion about every day being Valentine’s Day and, anyway, this special day is just a commercial concoction. The good news is that it’s good for the classroom.

Be Divergent
It’s an opportunity for the content to appear current and relevant. Best to combine it with something different. Like all divergent thinking, you never know where it might end. Who knows what might emerge? The task is not to combine the opposites, the strategy is to combine the divergent, the randoms, and even, the parallels

  • Valentine’s Day and humour
  • Valentine’s Day and tragedy
  • Valentine’s Day and ????

Valentine’s Day and geography – now there’s an unexpected romance! Who would have thought Cupid’s arrows could point us to GPS coordinates?

Valentine’s Day and technology – when ancient Roman saints meet satellite imagery. Perhaps St. Valentine would be amused to see his skull being located via Google Earth (though I imagine he’d prefer a more traditional pilgrimage).

Valentine’s Day and education – where love stories become latitude and longitude, and students navigate through history on a digital globe. From Cleopatra’s dramatic finale in the Valley of the Kings to Shakespeare’s Verona, suddenly geometry has a beating heart.

Valentine’s Day and architecture – because nothing says “I love you” quite like measuring the width of the Taj Mahal or counting lamp posts on the Lovelock Bridge in Montevideo. Who knew that love could be calculated in meters and coordinates?

And perhaps most deliciously unexpected – Valentine’s Day and chocolate geography! When students can virtually visit the world’s largest chocolate fountain in Switzerland, suddenly learning about the Swiss Alps becomes much more appealing.

A scavenger hunt brilliantly weaves these threads together – history, geography, technology, architecture, and romance – all wrapped up in an educational package that makes Google Earth feel less like homework and more like a treasure map to love stories around the world.

Because really, isn’t that what teaching is about? Taking seemingly unrelated elements – like GPS coordinates and romance – and creating something that makes students forget they’re learning while they’re busy discovering heart-shaped lakes in Croatia and calculating distances between lovers’ points?

PS Available now from my TPT Store – Valentine’s Day Scavenger Hunt on Google Earth