Halloween Fun

It's hard to keep a group of 15 five and six year olds calm on Halloween.  I wanted to recognize the holiday, yet not go crazy with 15 costumes, parades through the school and platters of cupcakes.  So we played it down a bit.  I took all the standards I wanted to cover for the day and found ways to teach them with the theme of Halloween.

We made jack-o-lanterns and then sorted them from the shortest to the tallest. Each child tested one jack-o'-lantern against others to determine its correct place in the lineup.  This helped the children to compare and contrast two objects and sequence items according to a rule.

Then we listened to two stories with spooky characters. We talked about the characters in the books, made a list of the characters with a focus on the first sound and number of syllables for each word.  The children were given the opportunity to make a spooky puppet.  They had to cut out a mixed up sentence starter, "I am a" and finish it using the name of their puppet.  This student is showing off his zombie puppet.  Note that we are becoming more familiar with letters, syllables and words in this fun but educational project.

But we weren't done yet.  We enjoyed a snack of jack-o'-lantern clementines, cheese, crackers and carrots, and one treat (cookies decorated like witch hats).  We talked about how oranges keep us from getting sick, cheese builds strong bones, and crackers give us energy.  Then we talked about how the cookie was a once in a while treat.  I think that covers a few science standards regarding what animals need (and want) to survive.

Then we made a graph to show what kind of face we wanted to carve for our jack-o-lantern.  The kids made a happy, mad, or scared face (once again focussing on the onset and number of syllables for each word).   This covers standards as we collected and shared data, compared numbers, and discussed more and less.  We also had to do some problem solving when our graph came up with a tie.

All in all, it was a pretty mellow Halloween day.  The kids were having fun, but were calm.  Here's to a safe night of trick or treating!