October Learning

I love Halloween!  I love Halloween stories. I love Halloween traditions and I love creating Halloween Art. Integrating reading, writing and learning with Halloween is so much fun as a teacher! 

I know that its already halfway through November but I wanted to post some of the fun stuff we worked on in October.

Below are images from our "pumpkin" making project. After reading the story, "Two many pumpkins" by Linda White, we worked on character development. We talked about the character Rebecca Estelle and her part in the story. We also discussed different reading strategies for when we come to a word we don't know. Finally we imagined what we would do if we had that many pumpkins. We wrote down our ideas and then created our own jack-o-lanterns like in the story. The pumpkins turned out really cute.

During October we also spent a lot of time looking at the difference between Nonfiction and Fiction. We read different articles about Spiders and compared them to the story, "Diary of a Spider." Finally we looked at Word families during Phonics. We created Word Family Webs and spiders to hang from them. Below you can see some of the webs we created during our Phonics block. 

 Vowel teams can be extremely tricky to practice. This year I created this Candy Corn Vowel team sort. Students were given a large word bank and asked to identify different vowel teams. It was a great activity to help teach them not only the sounds for different teams but also how to identify them in different words. They absolutely loved working in groups together and creating these candy corn pieces.

Get it here.

Like I mentioned earlier about working with characters, students learned all about characters during the month of October. They especially looked at character descriptions and how authors give their character's characteristics that make them unique and interesting to the story. They had to create the below characters and write about them, making sure to add plenty of details to describe them! 

 

Finally, we worked on learning how authors use quotations to make stories more interesting. We learned that quotation mark show when the author stops speaking and another character starts. We looked at many different books and identified the quotations as well as how to use them properly in our writing. Finally we created these little Halloween stories. Each child imagined that were entering a Haunted House and that different Halloween creatures jumped out and said things to them! They had to use quotations to tell the reader what the characters said! You can get the project here.

Hope you had a wonderful October! :)

Instead of carving this year... my sister and I painted!