Are your students getting worked up about Halloween?
Let’s face it. This can be a challenging time for teachers! All kids can think about is their costumes and the candy they will be collecting in their Halloween bags!
One way to harness children’s pre-holiday excitement is by focusing their enthusiasm on engaging reading and writing activities.
A perfect example is the Halloween Writing Activity, a guessing game, masking as a writing activity. (Pun intended!) Students create a descriptive paragraph about the costume they plan to wear, with one important modification. They keep their costume a secret! (Stay tuned to find out why!)
- Possible topic sentence: I have a great costume this year.
- Sample descriptive details: It’s a long black dress. The hat has ears. I have a long tail.
- Closing sentence example: Can you guess what I’m going to be?
After all the paragraphs are written, edited, and revised, the kids can listen to each others’ paragraphs and guess what their costumes are. (Now you know why they kept their costumes secret!)
Halloween guided reading books are another special treat (No pun intended this time!) for your class. Are you using printable books? The ones below are for children at the beginning stages of learning to read: I See a Ghost, Level B; It is Halloween, Level B; My Family’s Halloween, Level B; and On Halloween, Level C.
These same books are available with printable word work activities :
- I See a Ghost with word work
- It is Halloween with word work
- My Family’s Halloween with word work
- On Halloween with word work
What if your students are working digitally? The Google Slides versions of these books are especially fun because the texts are followed by drag and drop activities on sight words, phonics, comprehension, making sentences, spelling, or a bundle of all the skills. Check out the videos below to see how they work!
When your students are so excited about Halloween that all they can concentrate on is a game, How Many Words Can You Make? is just what you need! As children search for smaller words in bigger words, they are really exploring word families and spelling patterns. The activity is so much fun, kids don’t even know they are learning!
I almost forgot about my https://www.westernmassnews.com/2023/10/14/couple-welcomes-rare-spontaneous-triplets FREE Halloween activity: Teaching BOO! The word BOO is one of my favorite parts about teaching at Halloween time.
As you can see, Halloween doesn’t have to be a time when you give up on teaching reading and writing. Enjoy Halloween literacy with your students!
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