Monday, October 25, 2010

October Fun


For this last week of October we will be integrating lots of high interest activities into our curriculum. Just this morning the children formed partnerships to create a class Halloween counting book. First we introduced the idea of a Halloween counting book and predicted what characters might appear in such a book. Next, two examples of these books were read to the class as they checked on their predictions. The children were very pleased when some of their predictions of spiders, cats, and mummies were accurate. Our class book starts out with, "On Halloween night there was 1 haunted house, 2 witches, etc. all the way to include 12 ghosts. The partners agreed on what character they wanted for their page and what their number would be. Once the partners had a plan that they both agreed on, they worked together to draw and color their page for our class book.
Further Halloween activities this week will include making a class book about the Colors of Halloween. Again we will first predict what might be included in the trade book. Then we will check our predictions as the book is read. The children will then worked on the various pages to complete our own class book about Halloween colors. Later this week we will create a Halloween Alphabet Book for our class.
Our students will each make personal books that are shaped like ghosts which will include reading and writing Halloween words, and then drawing the pictures to match. We will also make jack-o-lantern books including different kinds of pumpkins. First we will talk about words that could be used to describe pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns. A pumpkin could be small, tiny, big, or maybe huge. A Jack-o-lantern could be happy, mean, scared, or maybe sleepy.
We will also create Halloween stories on the computer. These stories will include characters, an action, and a setting. We will introduce the concept of "when" our stories take place, such as, One Halloween night...