Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, ya'll! I hope you had a wonderful day full of productivity and calm students! To be totally honest, my day wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be! We took our first marking period sight word test this morning... our students are responsible for reading AND spelling all the sight words. This marking period, it was only 23 words, so it wasn't too bad. The math test I gave this afternoon? That's another story... NEVER AGAIN! Live and learn, eh?

Here's some of the Halloween-ish things we've been doing in my room this week!

With the shift towards more informational texts with the Common Core, I've been trying to get as much of it in their hands as possible. Each week, I'm introducing a new informational text feature using Hello Literacy's Informational Text Features Notebook. It's fantastic. If you don't have it, run and snag it now. It's on sale. I'm not being payed to say this and she doesn't know I'm saying it because it's really just that awesome.

ANYWHO, I got this amazing pumpkins book in my batch of free books from Scholastic at the beginning of the year. Super kid friendly but still filled with loads of awesome information. Our PTO also pays for a subscription for Time For Kids, which has been super awesome. There was an issue about spiders in the November pack that just came yesterday, so I pulled that sucker out for one last "Halloween-ish" thing today.

I know I clearly didn't invent the KWL chart, but I was super impressed with the questions my kiddos have been asking. I love love love using KWL as a previewing/sumarizing strategy! Any I love how excited the kids get when I add my terrible drawings that are supposedly "the best drawings in the world." We were all crazy surprised that pumpkins can be BLUE?! We were also super creeped out to learn that spiders see and hear through the hair on their legs?! Cray cray.

Today after our math test, I had a little extra time, so I dug out Roll A Monster from The Teacher Wife's Oh So Spooky activity pack. It's filled with tons of super stuff.

Tomorrow, we're having a Halloween "party" in our room. Translation? I didn't feel like having a real party so I'm just going to play some Halloween games and give them popcorn at the end of the day. Cross your fingers. I'll let you know how it goes!

In unrelated news, 2 pet pictures... First, our guinea pig is a diva. He flips his food dish and rips off his water bottle if I don't fill them quickly enough... Ha!

Last, my dog hates the doorbell. I decided that trick-or-treat would not be his thing!

Spooktacular Halloween Activities!

Hey all! Long time, no post. Story of my life. AND, this is my 100th post! To celebrate, I'm sharing my newest TpT product!!

There's TONS of fun things in this pack!!

My favorite part of the pack is this super easy LOW-PREP candy corn glyph! The students do all the work (none of that copying thousands of pages on construction paper!!)  He's super cute and bound to create lots of fun for Halloween!!

It's on sale for the rest of the night, and the first one to comment here will get a free copy!  Don't forget to leave your email address :-)

Spooky Writing

Writing is one of the things that I look forward to most each day... I'd been thinking of some ways to get in a little Halloween writing, and finally came up with the perfect idea. The other day, we read In a Dark, Dark Wood by David. A Carter. I had it on the board behind me during reading groups, and kept hinting at how scary it was. Every once in a while, I'd open the book and scream then slam it shut. Needless to say, those little first graders were ready to eat right out of my hand! When we finally read the book, they were ready to jump every time I turned the page! For those who don't know me, I'm slightly very theatrical. I made it seem as if something was going to jump out every time I turned the page. When we finally reached the end of the story, and the ghost popped out of the book, they just about died. They've been bugging me every day since to read it again. I love that even the simplest of stories can keep them SO excited! When we finished up, I had the students close their eyes and think about something that might scare them if they were walking through the woods on a dark, dark night. We talked a lot about descriptive language, and how we could help the reader to really picture these creatures in their mind. Then I set them free... They came up with the coolest things! Some went very traditional, and others went WAY beyond!

After Halloween, I'm planning on taking them down to make a book for our classroom library. Do you have any fun Halloween writing ideas? Please share if you do :-) Have a good night!