Valentine's Venn Mystery with Venn diagrams and probability

This is a Valentine's themed lesson where the students must figure out who sent the mysterious Valentine's Day cards.

There are 18 cards representing different students who might have sent the Valentine's cards. I recommend getting the students to cut out the cards so that they can easily sort and rearrange the cards later as they solve the puzzles. This could be an independant starter.

The included powerpoint presentation works through an example of selecting students which fit the given criteria using Venn diagrams. This starts with a single circle and progresses to three circles so is ideal for students who have not met Venn diagrams before or are not comfortable with them. Each student name starts with a different letter so that it is easy to write the initials up on the board in the correct circles. Alternatively you could have your students bring up one of the cards they have cut out and blue tac it to the correct section of the diagram. I image this as a full class activity although you could have students copy the diagrams to their books and fill them in individually first.

There is also a set of questions for students to solve independently once they have been shown the idea of Venn diagrams. It is possible to solve the questions without using Venn diagrams and so you may want to ask any students who don't intuitively draw the diagrams to use them for some questions. The probability questions at the end will be generally be easier to keep track of by drawing diagrams.

Finally the presentation includes some independant extension activities for students who finish early so that you can help students who need more support.