If you're in the market for a quick, easy, fun, and educational Valentines Day lesson plan, try writing Valentines Acrostic Poems with your students.  Plus, this Valentines Day Word List can be used for any number of activites - word searches, creative writing, Bingo, and so much more.

Please share your own Valentines Day activities.  I'm always on the lookout for new ways to celebrate holidays in my classroom.  Thanks!

Here's a Language Arts lesson idea that you can put into use tomorrow: Impromptu Speeches. Print out the Impromptu Speech Topics, cut each topic into a little slip of paper, fold them and put them in bag, and have student randomly choose a topic. Give them 5-10 minutes to write a quick speech off the top of their heads. Then start calling each child up one by one and watch the hilarity ensue.

This fun lesson takes little preparation work for the teacher, but teaches students the importance of thinking on their feet and offers fun writing practice with quick turn-around results.

Educators around the country have long criticized the No Child Left Behind legislation that deems schools as successes or failures based on test scores and other metrics.  This week, it was announced that the Obama administration is set to broadly revamp the program, along with an increase in education spending.

One key change would be the elimination of the 2014 deadline for making sure that all American students rise up to certain academic standards.  Additionally, there would be changes to how funding works and schools would be sorted into subcategories that take into account their unique circumstances.

What changes do you think should be made to NCLB?

Typically, students eat lunch then go play.  However, some schools are finding success by reversing the order of these two activities.  The benefits have included less wasted food, 40%  fewer nurse visits in the afternoons, and 15 more minutes of daily instructional time.

Instead of coming back to the classroom wound up from the playground, students have a chance to unwind with a more leisurely-paced meal.  Rather than rushing through lunch in order to play basketball, the students get their pent-up energy spent before they can refuel their tanks, so to speak.

Do you think this creative timing would work similar miracles with your students?  It can't hurt to try, right?