The highlight of this week was definitely that I was working the afternoon of Halloween in a middle school. Naturally, they had a dance. And of course I had to help supervise it.
There were tag games happening, a lot of jumping, but very little dancing actually happened.
What costumes were popular this year at a middle school in Canada?
VSCO girls were very popular (likely because apparently all you need is a tye dyed shirt, scrunchies, and very short shorts. Is it really a costume though if you already are a VSCO girl?
Anything that inflates. We had a giant dinosaur, a pinata (I think it was from Fort Nite), and things riding on other things.
Animals (specifically in the form of wearing a onesie). I think we had multiple deer and raccoons.
Mario Characters. Especially Luigi and Mario.
What (in my opinion) was the best costume? One of the EA's dressed up as Count Olaf from a Series of Unfortunate Events. Complete with ankle tattoo.
And here was my "costume" for this year
a $7 shirt I picked up from Michaels (the sweater and black pants I already had)
In other news our pumpkins won the pumpkin carving contest at my husbands work
He came home with a big bag of candy that we [mostly] unloaded on our trick or treaters.
What costumes were popular in your school this year?
Now that you've got your Halloween Bulletin Board up you are ready to get started on some Halloween art with your students...
Confession:
I keep a Word document saved on one of my USB's that's titled "art for the year". It's something that I came up with years ago in my very first year of teaching. At this point I know I liked grades 4-6 best and figured I would hang around these grades for years. Since I love art and want my students to have great art classes I quickly planned out what we would do at different points in the year for art (with multiple options in case one goes quicker than usual or I end up teaching the same kids the following year). This way my art lessons art already "planned" out for me and I just need to pick which one we will do!
I haven't updated it in a while but here is what I have listed under "Halloween"
Unfortunately I couldn't actually find any examples of artwork that my students had done for Halloween but if memory serves me correctly I have done the Northern Lights one before.
If you are wondering why none of my examples have witches or other typical Halloween characters it's because I tend to steer clear of them based off my own preference and at the school I used to teach in a lot of the parents probably wouldn't have liked it. I figured these art activities would be "safe"
What are some examples of Halloween art activities you've done in your classroom?
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about back to school bulletin board ideas and I thought to myself... why not continue with this idea throughout the year?
Now that it's October and Halloween is fast approaching maybe it's time to change up that bulletin board again. Honestly, you'll find a lot of great ideas just by using Google but here are some of my favourites
For this one I would have each cauldron talk about different things we'll be learning in our room over the next month (or 2)... maybe broken down into subjects (math and ELA are usually big ones)
I couldn't find much information on this one but I'm assuming it was an art project and there is a picture of each student under the ghosts. I just thought it was cute
For this one I would have students design it in an art class. We could talk about what we think belongs on a Halloween themed bulletin board and each student could be in charge of making an aspect (or 2) of it.
I don't think I've ever actually decorated my bulletin boards for Halloween.
So I'm starting to notice that not a lot of teachers are decorating their classrooms for Halloween (but now that I think of it I can't really recall a classroom I was in as a student that was decorated for Halloween.
Anyways, I don’t get out to nearly as many schools as I used to (I now have about 3 that I frequent that keep me fairly busy) so I don’t get nearly as large of a classroom sampling but once again I didn’t see much this year.
Ok, I'm not really sure if this was a decoration but it looked like a spider web
This is something I'd be more likely to do... fall leaves on top of the smart board
But then I thought? Would I decorate for Halloween? I mean I don’t decorate my house for Halloween. I think I would be more likely to put up Fall decorations and leave them up for the entire season than Halloween to be honest.
Do you decorate your classroom for Halloween?
If you are looking for other things to do with Halloween I've written a lengthy post linking to a bunch of free Halloween material for your classroom, talked about a Halloween writing activity I did to go along with a book I sometimes bring to classrooms around this time of year, and a post going over a couple of the Halloween costumes I've gone to school in.
I saw this in a classroom nearly a year ago (and I've been saving it for a more appropriate time to put up on the blog)... to be fair I did happen across this bulletin board in December and thought it was not quite right for the season.
The papers are hard to read but one of them says:
"Introduction and Naming our Pumpkins"
"We began our investigation by naming our pumpkins. We have a big one and a small one. First, we brainstormed a list of names for each pumpkin. Then, we took a vote to decide what their names would be. The vote concluded that the big pumpkin would be "Alvin" and the small pumpkin would be "Theodore"
Below that the paper says:
"Describing Alvin and Theodore"
"Next, we thought about all of the things that pumpkins "can do", what pumpkins "have" and what pumpkins "are". We came up with these lists as a class. Then, each student recorded the lists on their own sheet of paper. We hope to use these descriptive words as our pumpkin investigation continues!"
Their "can" list included words such as: roll, rot, light up, break, be white, float, and grow. Their "have" list included words like "seeds, stems, guts, bumps, scratches, dent, lines, and pulp. Finally, their "are" list included: round, orange, fat, big, small, yummy, heavy, squishy, and a fruit.
More hard to read pictures of words but here's what they say...
"Pumpkin Read-Aloud and Art"
"During the month of October our classroom library has remained stocked with plenty of books related to the autumn season. We read several books about pumpkins including one called "The Ugly Pumpkin" which served as our mentor text for our pumpkin art. In this book, the students noticed that not every pumpkin is perfectly orange and round... some pumpkins are actually quite funny looking! We also discussed how some fruits, like squash, like to masquerade as pumpkins just like the character in our story. The students were given two primary colours, red and yellow, so they could create whichever shade of orange that they liked. Our art turned our fantastic with some pretty creative, silly, and unique looking pumpkins!"
"Descriptive Pumpkin Writing"
"When we finished our pumpkin art we thought it would be a great idea to write about our pumpkins. It was fun to look at all the different pumpkins that the students created and to notice the differences. I demonstrated what format that writing might take by first creating my own pumpkin art and then describing the pumpkin in writing for the students. The students offered me suggestions on ideas about how I might describe my pumpkin. It was a real collaborative effort! The students' creativity and wonderful ideas continued to shine through in their writing"
"Pumpkin Predictions"
"Our class had many questions regarding our pumpkins, Alvin and Theodore. We compiled a list and decided to investigate Alvin to discover some answers. In groups of four or five, I showed the students a small sample of tools we would be using to help us answer these questions. For example, I would show them one unifix cube next to Alvin. Then I asked, how many unifix cubes would we need to make a tower tall enough to reach the top of Alvin's stem? We did the same thing with a piece of yarn. If one centimetre of yarn looks like this, how many centimetres of yarn would we need to reach around the centre of Alvin once? We answered each of our questions in a similar manner. Before carving Alvin we measured everything together and recorded the "official" answers. The students were very surprised with some of them! Others were very excited with how close their educated predictions were!"
"Skip Counting Pumpkin Seeds"
"After carving the pumpkin, removing the seeds and drying them out for counting we discussed as a class which method of counting would be the easiest and quickest. As a teacher, I was very pleased when the students came up with idea of skip counting piles of seeds almost right away. Every day during our morning we practice skip counting. The students suggested that we make piles of two, five, and ten to count all the seeds. We decided to make five equal groups of students. Two groups were responsible for skip counting their pile by two's, two groups were responsible for skip counting their piles by five's, and the final group skip counted their pile of seeds by 10's. We ended up counting 426 seeds!"
Monday I taught grade 2 where we learned what numbers added up to be 10, listened to Charlotte's Web, and wrote about our weekends in our journals (and yes, we did get side tracked with our sharing when I started it by mentioning the word "Christmas").
I noticed they haven't taken down their Halloween decorations yet... unless this spider is just always out and about. And here I am already decorated for Christmas!
One of my students also gave me a picture of a drawing he did during the day... he later asked for it back which is probably for the best since Pittsburgh is apparently the enemy.
Tuesday I taught in a grade 5/6 classroom. We watched a bunch of videos on why we shouldn't smoke (and voted on our favourites) you can actually watch (or show the videos to your class) here. Yesterday's class had halloween decorations still out and this class was free of all things Halloween. I actually quite liked the set up in this classroom... lots of windows and plants and I liked the counter they had by the windows with taller chairs so students could do work there.
They also wrote a bunch of "Things that are Awesome" on one of the windows. I didn't get a chance to ask them what that was all about but it seemed like an ongoing thing probably.
Wednesday was a half day outside of the big bad city. For the first couple of periods I had only 6 students! We played Go Fish (in French) and other French games online. After recess I had 16 students in my class for ELA and can i just say this teacher's library bins would look perfect in a future classroom of mine.
I also noticed they had a book tweets bulletin board in their classroom which I thought was kind of cool. Here's the general idea behind it
Thursday and Friday I was at the same school and the same classroom. It was one of the colony schools so you already know I had a delicious lunch provided for me. I had about 12 students in my class so it wasn't too rough of an end of my week.
My first year teaching grade 4 (and grade 5 and grade 8) I was a peacock
and last year I was Minnie Mouse.
Complete with yellow shoes
I was told I needed 3 costumes to recycle throughout my teaching career (assuming I stayed at the same school). Since I’m substitute teaching this year if I happen to be working today (October 30th) I’ll bring along my Minnie Mouse costume because it is easy to bring and change into… no new costume this year.
For those of us looking for an idea (probably for next year now since it is already Halloween) here is a list (with pictures) of 31 teacher costumes
It’s nearly here… Halloween that is. I always liked doing some activities specific to what holiday was coming up when I was in school and so when I’ve been a teacher I’ve also always enjoyed giving my students a little booklet of holiday activities to do. Today I’m doing the hard work of finding the work to put in these booklets for you (and I’m dividing it up by skill level and subject!). I’m also making sure it is free because that was ALWAYS a selling feature for me. Of course some of the material may be a little too easy for some of the groups or too difficult… so just use your judgement!
Warning: This post is going to be long and full of link... just scroll to through to the age level you teach and scan for the activities you want... I've given a brief description of them all.
To start with we have the early years (or kindergarten-grade 3). I always find this group the easiest to find free material for (and there is always so much of it!).
First, we have some writing paper. I found it on Teachers Pay Teachers but don’t worry… it’s free. The pages have big lines for kids who are still learning how to write.
Some reading comprehension pages (so a short story to read and a few questions) can be found on Itsy Bitsy Fun.
Here is a really simple crossword for your students that I got from ESL Themes.
An ABC maze (just follow the path in ABC order) from education.com
and also from education.com is a cut and paste Frankenstein activity (if you are putting this together in a book just make sure this page is not double sided)
On Halloween Ideas I found a matching worksheet where you match the word of a Halloween thing to a picture of it and a maze (that looks kind of difficult).
Next, I found a counting and colouring worksheet on tlsbooks.com. Students just have to find and count all of the ghosts (amongst other things) and write down the number… they can colour them as they find them so that they don’t count the same one multiple times.
Here is a colour by number page on education.com. There are a ton of similar ideas like this out there… just put in colour by number into Google for lots of other options.
Here is a Halloween themed page for adding one digit numbers to one digit numbers by Twisty Noodle.
I found this connect the dots page on Big Activities… I just picked one that was fairly simple. Finding more difficult ones isn’t hard with a simple Google search.
You can teach your students about bar graphs using this activity from Printables 4 Kids. All they have to do is count the number of the different kinds of candies and fill in the graph.
Have students work on their patterning by deciding what comes next in these Halloween patterns from Classroom jr.
For a whole class activity you could play some Halloween bingo. Artsy Fartsy Mama has 10 different cards ready for you to print.
And of course there are a plethora of Halloween themed colouring pages out there… just put it into Google or steal one of the following (or all of them).
Use one of these sheets for students to practice adding punctuation
There is a Vampire version or witches
Students can learn about monsters around the world with this worksheet from education.com or all about vampires (complete with a quiz at the end)
I found this vampire bats reading comprehension activity on Teachers Pay Teachers (don’t worry, it’s free)
Some Halloween themed word problems from Teacher Vision
I really like this idea on Teachers Pay Teachers. Just give each student a bag of M&M’s and have them complete this fraction activity. You could also add in a graphing activity.
Finally, some art ideas for Halloween can be found on
Rainbow Skies and Dragonflies (this one isn’t necessarily Halloween – which is great if you are at a religious school or any other school where Halloween may be a taboo topic.
A Faithful Attempt is one of my favourite art idea blogs. This art project could also be considered a fall art project and not necessarily Halloweeny.
Of course you can go up and get the bingo game from the other group above for some whole class fun too!... there is probably another Halloween themed bingo game out there that has more than 10 cards too.
Finally, the rest of the grades. These grades were the most difficult to find things for. What are they even into above grade 6? It’s a real mystery.
Pretty sure they would still a word search. This one from ESL Themes looked a little more difficult
The Teachers Corner has some different Halloween themed writing paper for your students to write a scary story on.
My students LOVED working with coordinate pairs last year (in grades 5 and 6). Math Aids has some 4 quadrant ones to make things a little more difficult for those upper grades.
And there you have it… a rather long list of fun, free, printable activities for you to do with your students this Halloween.
When all else fails.. plan a Halloween science experiment (or just show a bunch of Steve Spangler from YouTube
Am I missing anything? Is there something you like to do with your students that I didn’t include? Feel free to link it below in the comments section!
I was subbing this week for a teacher that was extending her first sick day to two sick days. When she called me she warned me that there would likely be some gaps in the day so I should feel free to bring something to do with the kiddos. And I obliged.
Who Will You Meet on Scary Street
The first thing I did was brought a book. This is no surprise as I've talked about it before... I [almost] always bring a book to read to the students.
So I read it to them and then told them to create their own monsters that they would meet on scary street. I told them that not everything on scary street needed to be scary and so there were at least a couple of girls that opted for the non scary monsters.
After they had their monsters all drawn and coloured I picked one page of the book
meet Triffid
and we used this page to work on our descriptive language. So we talked about how looked like a plant, a venus fly trap, someone counted his teeth, and that his eyes were coming out of his head and looked like oranges. I did this on the board in point form and then we wrote it into a short paragraph.
I loved our last sentence
"His bite is worse than his bark"
Here are a couple of our finished products
One of the students suggested that we put all the pages together and make a class version of "Who Will You Meet on Scary Street"... there wasn't time to do that so I left it for the teacher to do.
To do this you don't need this exact book (I've had mine for years).. just go out and find any other halloween book.
I feel like I was hardly in the classroom this week at school (this is a lie I suppose as I didn't have a single meeting or outing until Thursday but I'm clearly choosing to remember the end of the school week here).
- My students are so smart... I put a bunch of random objects that involved simple machines in gift bags and had them walk around the room pulling the objects out of the bags and picking simple machines that were in that object. What did we discover? A lot of objects use levers and (none that I brought in) use pulleys. Now we are ready to start learning more about each specific simple machine.
- We are still working on our Picasso portraits in art class. I'm hoping to move onto something more fallish for our next art class... but with so many unfinished it may not happen.
- In math we pulled out the textbooks for the first time and it was nearly a disaster. I need to figure out how to teach 2 groups at once.. I feel like it is nearly impossible BUT I'm not the first person to ever teach in a split grade class so it must be doable... I just have to figure out a routine that works for me.
- In SS we are learning about beringia, the land bridge, and the ice age. I'm teaching both grades SS but didn't want to split the class in half for that class so we are just going to plow through both grades... but it has taken us nearly a month to get started so I'm thinking I'll just be picking and choosing what we learn.
- LUCKILY, the grade 5 curriculum is on First People's and on Thursday we had aboriginal day. I lead them in a craft so I'm not sure exactly what they did at all the other stations but hopefully they learned a lot so we don't have to spend so much time on it. What was my craft? Sash weaving. Some got it... many found it hard. I guess it didn't help that there was a bit of wind this day. If I'm still around for next year I'll have to come up with another craft I think.
- In ELA I discovered that many of my students don't know what a paragraph is. So we took their writing folders and a story that I made with a bunch of errors in it and worked through the editing process with it. We did the first half together and their job will be too fix up the last half. We only got through checking spelling and punctuation so we'll be working on this for a while.
- On Friday we had our first cross country meet (our 2nd and last one is this coming Friday). It was the perfect afternoon to spend outside (I don't think we will be so lucky next Friday). One of the students on my team got first and the grade 9 boys also came in with a first and second place. I see some banners in our future....
- Other than all of that I've had meetings for 2 of my students. I've got some extra programing to do which is kind of frustrating but if you have a class where everyone is working at grade level without adaptations well then... lucky you. Our first step is going to be instilling the "ask 3 before me" rule for all subjects. It is just too much for me to teach 2 grades in math and then deal with everyones questions and those who want me to just sit next to them and read them the problem. So for our next health class we are going to talk about each of our strengths and make a poster for "ask 3 before me" where each student signs up for 2 subjects or areas that they think are their best that others can come to them when they have questions. I'm thinking what people can sign up for will be:
- Math
- Social Studies
- Science
- Reading
- Writing (this person will hopefully be good at spelling)
- Listening (this person will hopefully be good at listening to instructions)
- Art (for everyone who needs me to draw them a circle (yes, it has happened this year)
Once everyone has signed up for someone all students have to do is check the poster to see who they should ask for any topic and pick a couple of people from there BEFORE asking me.
- I switched up my seating plan after school on Friday... one of my students needs to be sitting in a way that she sees the least amount of distractions in the room. So, I tried to sit her where she wouldn't see the back wall at all and instead mostly see the front which is just white boards. I even sat in that spot for a while to make sure it was the least distracting.
I'm feeling good by at least taking 2 of the suggestions given to me at one of these meetings already.
- I also booked my classes first field trip! We are going to see a local performance of Peter Pan right before Christmas. It is kind of expensive so I'm going to try to use some of my classroom budget to off set the ticket costs for them... but I think it should be a fantastic play!
Next week is another busy week with meetings and a cross country meet... this time my meeting is after school so I guess at least I'll be in the classroom.
ANYWHO,
a while ago I mentioned I would start showing off bits and pieces of my halloween costume
for the record we do not celebrate halloween at my school
but I'm one of those people that doesn't think the idea of halloween is something that needs to be celebrated anyways.
But we do have a day where we get dressed up and we will likely have our first classroom party of the year.
so without further ado... here is the part of my costume that I didn't need to go out and buy.
It's hard to tell what it is because it is all black... on the left we've got some black tights and on the right is a black long sleeved shirt.
and got to working making my version of a peacock costume.
I took ideas from both costumes and here are some tips when making it:
Unless you know you are getting a great deal at the fabric store do not buy your felt there. I think I could have saved a bundle on the felt if I had boughten those small sheets of it at Michaels.
I believe I ended up buying 2 meters of black tulle and 1 meter of each blue and purple. I wish I would have boughten 3 meters of black though.
I tied the black tulle onto a ribbon... the black tulle sticks out further than the coloured ones. Then I tied everything else onto a second ribbon which I attached onto the first black ribbon (this seems very confusing but it's not). Then all I do is tie the ribbon around my waist. Easy peasy.
I'm planning on wearing it with black boots.
I considered putting a little glue on the back of each felt feather so that it wouldn't flip the wrong way... but never got around to it (and I was a little worried it would somehow ruin everything).
Another tip: I bought a bunch of peacock feathers at Michaels with one of their 40% off coupons (they have them all the time). The bunch came together and were glued onto this giant stick. I just pulled every feather off of it (I had to cut them all pretty short to stick in my hair anyways). I THINK this was cheaper then purchasing the feathers individually. I must have priced it out in store.
I already had peacock feather earrings so those were free!
I was subbing in kindergarten and had been there one day a week for about the past month prior to this particular day. Anywho, on this particular day the kids came in saying "trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat. Not too big, not too small, just the size of Montreal." You can imagine that it got really annoying really fast (luckily they pretty well forgot about it once O' Canada was finished playing).
But it got me thinking. Do kids in other countries say this? For those of you who don't know, Montreal is a city here in Canada. So maybe in the states they would say "just the size of Saint Paul (Minnesota) or Sioux Falls (South Dakota) or Lowell (Massachusetts), Centennial (Colorado) It's not a new thing to say... I know I definitely said it and heard it a lot growing up.
The weird thing about this day? It happened in June... nowhere near Halloween.
