Through expressive illustrations and relatable dialogue, Steven Kroll shows readers why friendships can be tricky—and why they're worth fixing. Students are encouraged to think about why the author included moments of conflict, sadness, and cooperation. By noticing repeated ideas and emotional details, readers can identify that the author's purpose is to teach an important lesson about listening, sharing ideas, and working together.

The Biggest Valentine Ever is ideal for helping students retell a story using key details from the beginning, middle, and end. Clayton and Desmond's conflict and resolution are easy for young readers to follow, making it a strong choice for summarizing practice. As students retell the events, they also reflect on the central lesson—that teamwork and friendship matter more than winning or being right.

Steven Kroll uses clear text structures—such as cause and effect, sequencing, compare and contrast, and problem and solution—to move the story forward. As Clayton and Desmond argue, work alone, and finally come back together, students can see how each part of the story connects to the next. By identifying how the story is organized, readers better understand the characters' choices and how those choices lead to the story's resolution.

Use this Common Core aligned comprehension assessment to evaluate students' comprehension of The Biggest Valentine Ever.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use The Biggest Valentine Ever as a springboard for instruction focused on initial L-blends. Students explore how two consonants work together at the beginning of a word and learn to hear both sounds in blends such as cl, gl, and pl. By connecting phonics instruction to the text, this lesson supports phonological awareness, decoding skills, and confident word reading through guided and independent practice.

This set of vocabulary development resources for The Biggest Valentine Ever highlights key words that are essential for students to understand while reading the story. Through engaging activities such as word games, word-to-definition and picture matching, and word categorization practice, students will build the vocabulary they need to comprehend this story—and many others—with confidence.

This Knowledge and Fluency Passage guides students through the steps of making a valentine card, highlighting key materials and actions like choosing paper, cutting shapes, and decorating. By connecting these familiar activities to The Biggest Valentine Ever, students gain a clearer understanding of the characters’ creative process. This passage builds vocabulary and fluency while supporting comprehension of the story’s main events. Use this passage before reading the book to build background knowledge and prepare students to better comprehend the text.

Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of The Biggest Valentine Ever includes several examples of cause and effect relationships, making it easy to use as a springboard for modeling or independent practice.

This simple resource includes four sentence stems. Each sentence stem presents an effect. Students will use what they know about the book to fill in the cause of the effect.

Read The Biggest Valentine Ever then have some fun matching cause and effect sentences from the book. By using these cause and effect cards, students will demonstrate both their comprehension of the text and their understanding of cause and effect relationships in a hands-on and interactive way.

This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in The Biggest Valentine Ever. Each cause card is marked with a square, and each effect card is marked with a circle, making it easy to support students who struggle with matching cause and effect relationships.

This response activity connects to The Biggest Valentine Ever as students think about how good friends solve problems, even when they disagree. After reading Valentine's Day scenarios, students use lessons learned from Clayton and Desmond to explain how they would handle each situation. By drawing or writing their solutions, students strengthen comprehension, social emotional understanding, and written response skills while making meaningful text-to-self connections.