Valentine's Day Matching Binder

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 19 pages, 120 type-in fields

• A Valentine's Day Request board: three request/identify slots (I want, I see, Show me) and a seven-picture match — with its own 7 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• A Heart Shape or Not a Heart Shape board: two sort slots and two picture grids on the same seven Valentine's Day words, split by what each picture shows — with its own 7 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• Both boards twice: a full-color set for a laminated binder and a black-and-white ink-saver set for the photocopier
• 28 cut-apart picture cards in all, counting the color set and the home page once
• A weekly tracker: 8 board jobs down, Monday to Friday across, one letter per cell (no help / pointed once / said the words / not run), a "no help" count per row and a week total
• A binder organizer: a front cover, a spine strip and 9 divider tabs (3 of them blank)
• A home version: the same seven-word bank, split into its two sort groups, for the kitchen table, with a seven-day "we did it" row
• A family update with a team hand-off block for the next adult who runs the binder
• A phrase bank: 24 lines in 6 groups (spoken lines for running the boards, written starters for the note afterward)
• A filled example — an invented student, one week, every count re-counted from its own row
• An answer key listing every board, the cards it takes and what correct looks like, plus the full word list (classroom set and home set)
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

A Valentine's Day vocabulary binder built on one seven-word bank (heart, two hearts, bow and arrow, love letter, heart with ribbon, ring, chocolate bar) run through two different boards — naming and requesting any of the seven at the first board, then sorting the same seven by whether the picture shows a heart shape at the second, each with its own tracker row. Most matching binders stop at the board; this one adds the tracker, the family update and the phrase bank behind it, so a week of matching practice turns into a week of counts a case manager can bring to a meeting.

The Boards

• Valentine's Day Request (page 6 in color, page 7 in ink-saver) — the board stays whole above a cut line; the card band below cuts apart. Three request/identify slots (I want, I see, Show me), and a seven-picture match (heart, two hearts, bow and arrow, love letter, heart with ribbon, ring, chocolate bar): the child matches the identical card onto its picture.
• Heart Shape or Not a Heart Shape (page 9 in color, page 10 in ink-saver) — two sort slots ("This is a heart shape," "This is not a heart shape") and two picture grids on the same seven Valentine's Day words, so the exact seven words appear on both boards (see WHY "HEART SHAPE OR NOT A HEART SHAPE" IS A PICTURE SPLIT, below).

The Words

• Valentine's Day request cards (7): heart, two hearts, bow and arrow, love letter, heart with ribbon, ring, chocolate bar
• Heart shape cards (3): heart, two hearts, heart with ribbon
• Not-a-heart-shape cards (4): bow and arrow, love letter, ring, chocolate bar
• Home page — heart shape cards (3) and not-a-heart-shape cards (4): the same seven words, split the same way

Every picture was chosen to be named in one word (or the same short two- or three-word phrase, "two hearts," "bow and arrow," "love letter," "heart with ribbon" or "chocolate bar") by a young child, in color AND in the black-and-white set.

WHY "HEART SHAPE OR NOT A HEART SHAPE" IS A PICTURE SPLIT, NOT A CLAIM ABOUT ANYTHING ROMANTIC

The second board sorts by what each PICTURE shows, not by any claim about love, romance or a real relationship: the heart, two hearts and heart with ribbon are all drawn with a heart outline; the bow and arrow, love letter, ring and chocolate bar show a different object, with no heart outline, in both picture sets. This board is only a claim about what these seven pictures show, the same kind of checkable, picture-only split this collection's other sort boards (on-the-road-or-not, has-fins-or-not, flower-or-not-a-flower) already use.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the tracker, the organizer, the home page and the family update, or print and use a pen. The board pages print on cardstock or plain paper; the card band cuts off the bottom and the board stays whole. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document, and it is not a test of anything.

It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule, and it does not decide what a count means for a student or when a board is done with. The heart-shape sort is a claim about what each picture shows, not a claim about anything loving or romantic. The tracker counts which boards were done and what help was given, and nothing else.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers and paraprofessionals running functional-vocabulary or naming practice with early, pre-reading or low-verbal students around Valentine's Day, case managers who need that practice to show up as data, and the families who get the home page.

More In The Collection

This binder is part of the Morning Work & Adapted Books Collection; more matching binders are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same boards-plus-tracker shape.

Pictures (color pages): Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0. Pictures (ink-saver pages): Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License.