Each Halloween, my classroom becomes a series of Halloween activities for about two weeks. Here are some fun things to do to support math and literacy in your classroom:
Recount Writing: Our Best Halloween Costumes
This is a great home-school connection or addition to your literacy writing station. Students are encouraged to write about their best Halloween costumes. A helpful planning sheet is included for your struggling writers. This writing activity will encourage writing at any grade level.
This package includes Halloween letter writing paper and lined paper for emergent and established writers. Art work created includes kids in costumes, jack-o-lanterns, spiders and bats.
Silly sentences have always been a fun way to explore sentence building and recognizing parts of speech. Students in grades 3 through 6 will have the opportunity to use subject, verb and complement cards to build and simplify silly sentences. Challenging verb cards are included with this unit as well as nouns associated with the Halloween theme, a blank sentence building template, display and label cards and a synonym chart. This is a perfect activity to use in your Word Work Stations or as an extra project for early finishers.
Halloween is always a fun time of year to introduce writing forms to your students. This unit contains three forms: descriptive writing, procedural writing and informational writing.
The descriptive writing component is introduced through an Onomatopoeia Poem. With the creation of words that produce natural sounds, students can come up with a creative way to explore the world of poetry. It is recommended that a Halloween CD be used for this activity. If a CD is not available, you may access the internet for Halloween sounds or have students come up with their own. When writing a procedure, students can come up with a Halloween Recipe that will send shivers down the reader’s spine. A step by step “how to” activity is included to assist in the procedural writing process.
Finally, the informational piece is always a fun one that allows students to publish their work on specialty writing paper. Students will explore fascinating facts about bats and explain why bats exhibit certain characteristics, habits or features.
This writing kit includes a writing guide to assist your students, writing forms, display ideas and book covers (if you choose to turn these into class books), specialty writing paper and a rubric.
Halloween Math Stations are a fun way to consolidate learning for students in Grades 3 to 6. This package of activities includes a patterning poster project, word cards, poster templates and a rubric to use after working through terms such as increasing patterns, decreasing patterns and repeating patterns. Two criteria checklists have been developed. One uses the slide, flip and turn vocabulary while the other uses translations, reflections and rotations. A sample poster planner is part of this package as well as images to use in the creative part of the poster. Individual patterning practice activities are included, an addition game, multiplication game and a place value game using numbers between 0 and 99.
Students will be prompted to tell or write story with a Halloween theme. This unit includes a story prompt sheet, graphic organizers, word lists (Halloween & transition words), rubric and specialty writing paper with full and half lined pages.
Halloween images are presented in an organized arrangement by number. Students will learn to recognize the number of objects without counting them. This is called “subitizing”. Incorporating these images into daily number chats provides opportunities for students to work on counting, seeing numbers in multiple ways and learning combinations.
Each page contains 4 of the same image but in different combinations for number chats. You may use one set of 4 images per day. The students can apply the strategies from each picture presented in whole or small group math chats.
Part-part-whole cards are designed to assist students in computation of number sums. This unit of 25 part-part-whole cards will allow students to practice sums from 2 to 10. The unit includes 2 variations for the numbers 2 and 3 and 3 variations for the numbers 4 to 10. With numbers hidden with flaps, Students can then justify what the missing part is and lift the flap to verify their answers. Cards may be used during a number talks, during guided math groups or for individual assessments.
Here's a free product your trick or treaters will love: Halloween Loot Bag Tags. Just add a loot bag and goodies before placing this tag on the treat bag.
