Halloween in the Classroom

Halloween is often the first party of the school year, and after a busy back to school season, it can be challenging to plan out! I thought I would share a few of my favorite Halloween read alouds, activities, and some tips and tricks that I have used to make this crazy day a little less taxing!

This post also contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

Halloween Party

Choose Your Snacks And Drinks

Many schools have health and wellness policies that spell out the types of snacks and drinks that you can serve.  Often schools require that treats be store-bought or pre-packaged as well.  Make sure you check these requirements before requesting items from parents.

Invites

I like to send a note home to my parents a week or two before Halloween to let them know how we will be celebrating.  You can grab this Halloween Party letter to parents freebie by clicking here.

Make sure to ask for parent volunteers as well.  Determine how many activities you will have, and request a parent volunteer for each activity.  You might also want to include a volunteer (or two) that focus on delivering and cleaning up food items.

Music Maestro

What's a party without music?  I love using Kidz Bop in the classroom because I don't have to worry about inappropriate lyrics playing when I least expect it.  Halloween is crazy enough without having to deal with parent calls after school!

Kidz Bop Halloween Hits is perfect for Halloween, and best of all, you can stream it for FREE if you are an Amazon Prime member.



Language Arts

Halloween Word Search Printables

Print out this fun Halloween Word Search puzzle and get your students ready for everyone's favorite spooky holiday!

Math

Halloween Color By Number Math Facts Practice

Color-by-number activities are ALWAYS a hit in my classroom, and Halloween is no exception!  I love being able to get a little math fact practice in with my students with these color-by-code sheets.

Halloween Color By Number Addition Math Facts

Halloween Color By Number Multiplication Math Facts

FREEBIES - Download the previews of these resources for a free color-by-number worksheet!

Ghost Math Facts Craftivity

And in keeping with the math fact theme, another great activity that can be used to celebrate Halloween in the classroom are these adorable math fact ghosts!

Ghost Addition Facts I Know Craftivity

Ghost Multiplication Facts I Know Craftivity

Eye Ball Math

You can make another great Halloween-themed math game with these spooky eyeballs from Dollar Tree. (If you can't find them, Amazon has a set of these eyeballs as well). Simply write numbers onto the eyeballs using a sharpie.  You can practice skills such as:

• math facts
• double digit multiplication, subtraction, or addition
• long division
• rounding

While you are at Dollar Tree, grab a bag of candy corn to practice comparing numbers.

Reading

Halloween Read Alouds

One of the best things about Halloween is that there are so many great read-alouds centered around it.  I buy most of my Halloween-themed books from Amazon - being a Prime member makes it so much easier since they arrive quickly even when I buy one at the last moment.  I have also purchased from Scholastic and Barnes and Noble (which always has great holiday displays in their children's section).


I shared a list of my favorite Halloween read-alouds in this blog post.

Halloween Mad Libs

I love using Mad Libs in the classroom, and Halloween is no exception! There are quite a few options:

Miscellaneous Ideas

Make ANY assignment more festive by printing on Halloween orange paper.

What things do you do to celebrate Halloween in your classroom?

 I would love to hear from you! ❤️

Have a question? Idea for a resource you might find helpful?

Be so kind and leave a comment below.

Halloween Read Alouds

My students LOVE Halloween and I LOVE reading aloud to them, so here are a few of my favorite Halloween read alouds that are perfect for upper elementary students!

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love.  

The Ugly Pumpkin

This is a Halloween/Thanksgiving twist on the classic fairy tale The Ugly Duckling. The Ugly Pumpkin waits all season long for someone to take him home for Halloween, but no one will. He doesn't look like the other pumpkins, so he sets off in search for a place where he will fit in.  Sure enough, he finds exactly where he belongs - BUT, it's not at all what he expected!

Teaching Ideas:

Themes: Loving yourself, fitting in

Grammar: 

Adjectives - this book is filled with great adjectives for your students to find including: ugly, bright, crispy, late, cruel, overrun, odd, and happy.

Adverbs - your students can find a plethora of adverbs including: plainly, early, when, alone, awhile, then, and finally.

Verbs - See if you can challenge your students to write some sentences using the verbs in the story: waiting, picked, looking, getting, tricked, laughed, rolled, and happened.

Writing: This book is an adaptation of a fairy tale, see if your students can write their own adaptation of The Ugly Ducking or the fairy tale of their choice.

Pumpkin Jack

If you are a Kindle Unlimited Member, you can get the Kindle version of this book for FREE here!

Tim carves a pumpkin that is fierce and funny.  A pumpkin like that deserves a name, and so he gives him one - Jack. Tim loves Jack so much that he keeps him "Long after the best trick-or-treat candy was eaten".  He keeps Jack until it begins to rot and Mom tells Tim to throw it out.  He takes it into the garden instead, and that is where the magic begins! He watches it throughout the year as it undergoes many changes until becoming his Jack'O'Lantern again. 

Teaching Ideas:

Themes: Loyalty, friendship

Grammar: 

Adjectives - fierce, first, funny, perfect, good, best, warm, magic, different, wrinkled, silly, bright, orange, brown, colder, flatter, cold, heavy, faded, crumpled, distant, thin, warm, hot, green, hidden, tired, new, tattered, pale, limp, wet, withered, unripe, bright, and generous.

Figurative Language - There are many examples of figurative language throughout the book:

"...the brown ghosts of last summer's plants"

"Flowers opened on the plant each morning, yellow stars that twisted shut forever in the afternoon."

"...searching for green pumpkins like hidden treasures."

"... the pumpkin plant seemed tired."

"The frozen plants seemed changed to pale blue glass."

Science: This book has a great science tie-in with the life cycle of a pumpkin.

Bone Soup

This fun little tale is a Halloween adaptation of the classic Stone Soup. Finnigin is infamous for his ravenous appetite.  Every where he goes he carries his eating stool, his eating spoon, and of course his gigantic eating mouth.  

When he happens upon a new town, all of the creatures there have been warned about his ravenous hunger, and they lock up all of their food.  Finnigin stirs up some delicious Bone Soup and tricks them all into sharing with him.

Teaching Ideas:

Themes: sharing

Vocabulary:  There are so many great vocabulary words in this book including: wits, ravenous, barren, impending, plague, locusts, panic, spare, cauldron, ceremoniously, splintered, ghoul, delicacy, stammered, fetched, stash, wistful, and longingly.

Punctuation: Many of the sentences include commas and quotation marks.  You might give students samples of these sentences without the punctuation and ask them to correct them.  You could also ask them to find the sentences and generate some punctuation rules for them.

Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich

If you are a Kindle Unlimited Member, you can get the Kindle version of this book for FREE here!

This book of poems is filled with monster size problems!  Frankenstein's cupboards are bare. The Creature from the Black Lagoon doesn't wait an hour before swimming and goes into the bog too soon.  The Phantom of the Opera has a song stuck in his head.  The witches have watchers. And, don't even get started on Dracula's hygiene issues!

If your students are fans of Shel Silverstein poetry, they will love these ones!

Teaching Ideas:

Writing: Have your students write their own Halloween poems.

Figurative Language - Can your students find the figurative language throuout the book?

Onomatopoeia

" Cack cack-a-doodle-a DOOOOOOOOO!"

Alliteration

" Fancy folk avoid his feet"

"the personality of plaid"

At the Old Haunted House

If you are a Kindle Unlimited Member, you can get the Kindle version of this book for FREE here!

The rhyming text of this book makes it so fun to read!  At the old haunted house there are all kinds of creatures: a big ma monster and her wee monsters two, a scrawny black cat and her wee kittens three, a green pa goblin and his wee goblins four, and even more!

Writing: Have you

Teaching Ideas:

Writing: This would make such a great mentor text for writing all sorts of things.  Have your students use the same model to write a story book, or to teach about a non-fiction topic.

What are your favorite Halloween Books to Read Aloud?  Share with us in the comments!

5 For Friday - Oct. 30, 2015

It has been awhile since I've joined in with DoodleBugsTeaching for Five for Friday, but since I have the day off today in honor of Nevada Day, I really have no excuse not to!

In Nevada, we celebrate Nevada Day the Friday before the official Nevada Day (October 31st).  So, since today is a day off of school, we had our Halloween celebrations yesterday.  The kids had a blast!  I am not going to lie and say that Halloween is NOT my favorite day of the year as a teacher, but I do enjoy seeing them have a good time.

Because today is a holiday, we took our weekly math tests yesterday morning.  You could imagine my students' surprise when our principal (dressed as Sandra D), vice principal (dressed as a T-bird) , school secretaries (Pink Ladies), and school counselor (T-bird) burst into our room singing and dancing.

They had a little speaker with them that was playing You're The 

One I Want from Grease as they came in.  My students just sat there in shock.  As they walked out one of them said, "I think that song was from a movie." LOL!

I was able to attend the NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) conference last week and learned so much!  I can't wait to share the ideas with my students and also with you here on the blog. Stay tuned to Sunday's blog post for the science lesson I used with my students this week.

We have had a crazy few weeks as a family as well with Tyler's first Homecoming and Cody's first band concert.

In honor of Nevada Day, some of my fellow Nevada sellers have gotten together to throw a sale at our TPT stores.  My sale is running today and tomorrow.  You can visit my TpT store here.



Hope you have a great weekend and a Happy Halloween!

Five For Friday October 31, 2014

Happy Halloween! Time to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday! We have had a crazy busy fun filled week!  Lots of history and lots of candy make for an exhausting week!

My week started with a field trip for the Earth Science STEM class I am taking.  We all met at the Churchill County Museum in Fallon, NV (which we toured a bit before leaving) and then headed to a place called The Hidden Caves which were used by Native Americans.  It is the site of several archaeological digs, and they have opened it up to the public.  Here are a few pics from our visit:

 

 

 

 

Monday, I took my own class on a field trip to City Hall as part of our social studies curriculum.  They were able to meet and greet with the mayor and then take a tour of the building.  They had a ton of questions for our mayor!  They were also able to see voting in action as we are currently in the middle of early elections.

They were so surprised to see their teacher's picture on the wall (I am on the city council).

They even got bags of goodies!  They were filled with pencils, city pins, Nevada pins, along with candy and glow sticks.

We received dictionaries from the Rotary Club this week and they were so excited to each have their own!  They also noticed that there were resources in the dictionary such as a map of the United States, common conversions, and even a multiplication chart.  They were quite amazed by the longest word in the English language and were extremely thankful that I would not be putting it on our spelling test this week!

In Nevada, we celebrate Nevada Day on October 31st, so we actually have today off!  Yesterday we participated in a record breaking attempt at the most people singing Home Means Nevada as part of our state's 150th birthday celebration.

 

We also learned about the Pony Express - complete with a reenactment!  Photo creds to one of my third grade team members.

And since we have today off.. we celebrated with our Halloween party yesterday.

 

 

Be sure to link up and share your week as well!