Halloween Fun! :)

Halloween was SUPER fun in our classroom! We did a TON of activities that that students (and I) loved! This post might be really long, because I took 50 gazillion pictures this month. :)

We read many Halloween books this month! (The only one of these we didn't read was The Night Before Halloween) I bought Haunted House, Haunted Mouse when the bookfair came to our school, and all of the other books I bought at BAM on the sale shelf! My favorites were A Job for Wittilda and In a Dark, Dark House (We dimmed the lights to make it spooky for that story.. and there was a scary surprise at the end which made it that much more fun!).

After reading A Job or Wittilda, the students came back from PE to find this on the wall outside our classroom! We then had a creative writing assignment where the students had to answer the question, "Why did Wittilda the Witch crash into our wall?" In the story, she was flying to deliver pizzas--so that explains one of our student answers below.

Left: Wittilda the Witch crashed into our wall because she was about to see me and Elliana get hit. Me and Elliana had a broom. The end. :) Too funny!

Right: Wittilda the Witch crashed into our wall because she went to deliver pizzas so the can get money to feed her cats and her. :) Someone was paying attention to our story! Great job and what a great illustration!

 

Next let's move on to Math! Let me just say that all of our first grade classes did this activity--I can't take credit for inventing this cool one. We watched the book Dem Bones on Bookflix (Yes, I said we WATCHED a book! If you have not been introduced to Bookflix yet, please look it up. This website is amazing!) and then the students were given a bag of candy bones. When they opened their candy bones the students were instructed to group all of the same bones together, and then they graphed how many of each bone they had in their bag!

Check out what one of my students did with his bones after he graphed them! I thought it was too cool NOT to post! :)



 I found these itty-bitty pumpkins at Wal-Mart (for a DOLLAR a pack!) and these creepy haunted house plates at Dollar General and thought they would be perfect for Halloween Math! We used these for addition practice. For example, the addition problem shown below was 3+2. The students took three pumpkins and placed them in the first window, then took two pumpkins and placed them in the second window. To find the answer they took the pumpkins in the windows and placed them in the third section of the plate, then counted them all. We usually use snap cubes, bingo counters, or things like that as manipulatives so the students really enjoyed our change of manipulatives!

Ok so this isn't the prettiest data sheet ever, but this is where we recorded our Halloween Data. The students came one by one to record their name under each category if it applied to them. They used their results to create the Frankenstein glyphs that you see below. I let them decorate the faces however they wanted--as you can see they were very creative! :)