Many teachers (especially in lower grades) assign reading at home each night. Here’s a reading log series I made with an extra festive touch for different times of the year just for fun. Click on the links below the image to download each page. Enjoy!
Pumpkins are so iconic of Halloween that you can’t help trying to squeeze them into your lessons whenever you can. This kindergarten teacher had the students sponge paint paper bags orange, stuff them with newspaper and make a pumpkin patch on their bulletin board. For older (yet still young) kids, you could write adjectives that describe pumpkins on the bag after it’s painted to integrate some language study.
When I saw this the other day in a third grade classroom, I just had to snap a photo. What a cute idea to make a Frankenstein in the style of Pablo Picasso! After looking at examples of Picasso’s work, students used construction paper, scissors and glue to create their own version of Frankenstein. Awesome!
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This one’s a fun Halloween writing project… We talked about transition words first, and then specifically sequencing words. Then each student wrote about the steps to carving a pumpkin. Then students made the classic construction paper jack-o-lantern during art time to go with the finished writing project. Simple, yet festive!
Here’s a page for this idea (but smaller and less time consuming if you have kids just draw a pumpkin). Click here for the PDF: How to carve a pumpkin PDF
Click here for more fun and free Halloween stuff for kids!
I recently saw this fun Halloween writing project. Students were to write a letter to Mr. Scarecrow from the view of a pumpkin who never gets chosen when kids come to pick out their pumpkins. Some students wrote about bribing the scarecrow to help them get chosen and others simply wrote a letter of lamentation. Hilarious! This class used a pattern for their scarecrows, but you could easily have students draw their own Mr. Scarecrow on white paper instead. Love it!
This fun Halloween coloring page uses simple addition, subtraction and multiplication. Depending on the answer of the math question, they color each section of the picture a different color. Click here for the printable PDF: Halloween math fact coloring page Happy Halloween!
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Some teachers celebrate birthdays in their classrooms. There are many different ways to celebrate birthdays that don’t fall during the school year. Here’s how I deal with birthdays as a an upper grade teacher:
I designate one day during the school year to celebrate summer birthdays. This past year, I chose the last day before Christmas break. The day was pretty much wasted anyway, since the kids can’t concentrate right before Christmas and they’re all distracted by the upcoming vacation. I told the students with summer birthdays that they could bring in a birthday treat and we would sing to all of them. So, a midst all the chaos of the holidays (we had a party in the afternoon), all the birthday kids brought out their treats to share and we sang to them. It was nice to combine it with the party because it was less distracting than celebrating summer birthdays on a day we were trying our best to be productive. The kids didn’t seem to notice it was combined with anything else, so they all felt special.
One of my mistakes my first year was putting all the prizes in the treasure box in the beginning of the year. Then, once everything in there had gotten uninteresting to the students, I had already spent the little money I was given and couldn’t replenish it. These became one of the most popular items in my treasure box, because, let’s face it- kids just don’t like homework.
I made sure to write the student’s name on it and sign them when a student won a homework coupon because they weren’t valid without my signature. In addition, I would require my students to staple the coupon to the corner of the assignment when turning it in, so I couldn’t lose it (since it was 1/8 sheet) and it was clear to me which assignment the student wanted the coupon to count for. When I graded the assignment, I would only tear off half of the coupon, so the student would have “proof” that I had seen their coupon and there was no way for students to try to use it again. I chose bright color paper to run these off on, so I could always identify them easily in a pile. I made it clear to my students that I would not replace lost coupons. Since they had a student’s name on them written in my handwriting, there seemed to be no incentive to try to steal them, so that worked out nicely as well.
Just because I’m nice, I gave each student one coupon at the beginning of school, and because teachers have no money nowadays, this was their birthday present also. The kids seemed pretty excited to have the option to skip homework on their birthday.
Click to download the homework coupons.
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