Halloween Recap!

Hey everyone! I can't believe how fast the year is going! I blinked and October just flew! I probably should have been posting as it went, but with parent teacher conferences, progress reports, field trips, and school scheduled functions, I got a little behind. But I'm back and ready to do an October recap. Here are my top 5 favorite things we did last month! :)

#1: Reading Comprehension and Story Development: Below you can see my second graders holding up their Jack O'lanterns in front of one of my favorite October projects, "Our Halloween characters!"

How are cute are they!? I just love this picture! 

During October, we worked a lot on the development of character. We read fun October stories, analyzed how characters are described, and how they can change as a story progresses. 

Students created Halloween characters using paper, scissors, and glue. (no drawing or pencils allowed! Just cutting!) Then, they have to describe their character using proper organization and structure. We share them as a class and hang them on our Second grade writing wall! They each turn out so unique and different! 

 We then read the book, "Too Many Pumpkins" by Linda White and discuss the character of Rebecca Estelle. We talked about how her feelings towards pumpkins changed over the course of the story and we mapped out the evidence from the story that shows this change. We also wrote about what we would do with too many pumpkins and create Jack o'lanterns, just like Rebecca Estelle, to hang in the classroom windows for our Halloween Carnival.

#2: Math Manipulatives: This month we also used tons of fun manipulatives from the Dollar Store and Party City to make Math and 3 digit addition more exciting! 3 digit numbers are written on eyeballs, witch fingers, and gravestone cards to create engaging ways to compare, order, and add 3 digit numbers. 

                 

Here you can see the kids using the eyeballs and grooves in our school benches to order the eyeballs from least to greatest. You can also see the kids using the witch fingers to add together on whiteboards and the gravestone addition problems in a fun Halloween cup to solve 3 digit addition with no regrouping. 

Manipulatives make strengthening concepts that much easier! They are naturally more engaging and fun. There is so much you can do with them! Here are some other ways we used them this month! 

• We used the cards to play a scoot game to review 3 digit addition with no regrouping.
• We used the eyeballs to practice greater than and less than symbols. 
• We used the witch fingers to practice adding more than two addends.
• We hid the eyeballs around the classroom and went on a scavenger hunt to create Math problems. 
• We even combined the app, Doceri, to create instructional videos using our manipulatives to explain how to solve 3 digit addition problems.

Here you can see the eyeballs being used to compare and order numbers at a Math station!

#3. Quotation Marks with Candy Corn: What is one of the most exciting parts about Halloween? Well... the candy of course. In October as part of our study on characters, we learn about dialogue and use candy corn to learn about quotation marks! 

Students pick a scary Halloween character to say something. We write our sentences on strips and glue the candy down. We then create silly stories about visiting a Haunted House. In the story, Halloween characters talk to the author. We focus on the importance of differentiating what words we use, so as to make our story more interesting. You can find this activity here if you want to try it next year with your kiddos! 

#4 Halloween Technology: As a Blended Learning teacher, I am constantly trying to use technology in the classroom with my kiddos to help transform their learning, build deeper connections, and apply their understanding.  

During October, we used Doodle Buddy Stamps to help solve Halloween Word Problems. Below is a video I took of two of my students solving a repeated addition problem about spiders and their webs. You can see how they used the stamps to create a visualization of their thought process. They then created their own word problems! 

Here is an example of one of the problems they created! 

We also used the app, Chatterpix, to create Monster stories that outline what a Monster likes to do on Halloween. Students used clay to create silly monsters. They then wrote a script from their monster's perspective and used chatterpix to make them talk. 

We likewise used another app called Pic Collage, to create collages that show some of the fun Halloween stuff we did in class in October! 

#5 Dress up: Ok, so the last and final favorite for the month isn't so much a classroom activity but I loved it anyways! My primary staff dressed up as Jurassic Park for Halloween! Some of us dressed as escaped dinosaurs, while others dressed as the tourists being chased! I just love Halloween! We had such an awesome time! 

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! 

Halloween Character Project

So, I know that Halloween was a week ago, but its one of my favorite holidays and I wanted to share with you all the wonderful Halloween characters my students created. 

We've recently been working on two different targets in Language Arts.

LT: I can identify the beginning, middle and end of a story.

LT: I can identify where the author describes the character.

Therefore for Halloween, we created our own characters! We started by reading a bunch of different Halloween stories, including "The Big Pumpkin" by Erica Silverman, "Skeleton Hiccups" by Margery Cuyler and my personal favorite, "Room on the Broom" by Julia Donaldson. We used these stories to help get our minds buzzing about Halloween.

We then made a giant classroom list of all the potential Halloween characters we could write about. 

After each child picked a Halloween character, students were given a black piece of construction paper, scissors, a glue stick and 3 Halloween foam stickers. I emptied my bin of scrap paper on the back table and told students that they were only allowed to use the scissors and glue to create their scary halloween character. NO markers, crayons or pencils....

Then the mess! and what a mess! There was paper scraps everywhere!!! My classroom has never looked that messy! But boy was it worth it.... they turned out amazing! Take a look for yourself! 

 After making these characters, we spent a few days learning about how to describe a character and how to develop a beginning, middle and end of a story. Then we began the writing process to create stories for our characters. Students met with me, and did peer revisions with a partner. Finally, they were complete! We hung them in the hallway for all the parents to see during our Halloween school parade!

Here is the Rubric I used to grade the finished drafts. You can download it for free here!

Can't wait for Halloween next year!!!

Halloween Bats

So, I normally don't teach art class, but last week our school's art teacher was sick. Suddenly, I had an hour unplanned and 25 kiddos staring at me. Lucky for me, my Thursday volunteer was able to suggest this amazing project! We made bats by tracing our hands on black paper. She found the project here.

How cute are these!!?