History of Valentine’s Day: A TpT Freebie

If you high school students were anything like mine, they loved celebrating Valentine’s Day with their friends. For many, it is a special day and what student doesn’t love to have a special lesson that gives them a short break from the regular class work?

Indulge your class and spend some time on a Valentine’s Day history lesson. It’s great for world history or American history classes and it does focus on the history of the holiday. By focusing on the holiday, if you have to justify your daily lessons to administration you can point out that this is in fact a history lesson.

How much is it?

This is a free download in my TPT store. Let’s be serious, no one NEEDS to know the history of Valentine’s Day. This is just for fun. So it’s free. Enjoy.

What is it?

This is a 10-page booklet. The readings are not long and the entire thing could take as little as 10 minutes. Use it as an alternative to your bell work or warm up work.

Looking to waste some time today? Split students into small groups, assign each group a section or two and have students present what they read, illustrate what they read, write summaries, whatever.

The booklet covers concepts the Roman ancestors to Valentine’s Day, Geoffrey Chaucer’s influence, medieval and Enlightenment influences, and how the holiday took off in the modern age.

Why did you make this resource?

I was reading an article about the history of Valentine’s Day and some of the information seemed fishy. I began a deeper dive into the day and realized that some of our modern ideas about the holiday are highly inaccurate but are proliferating on the internet as “fact.”

Develop this lesson a little further and have a lesson about “facts” students can find on the internet and how to find real answers.

Click the image below to go directly to my TPT store and download this free resource.

Happy Valentine’s Day!