Halloween and Monsters!

Halloween came and went so quickly! We are not allowed to "officially" celebrate Halloween, but I sneaked in some of Deanna Jump's activities from her Halloween packet.  We did this fun survey together and then completed the graph in our math journals.  You can get Deanna's Halloween packet here .  There is also a fun emergent reader to go along with this packet!

We did the survey and graph together using my document camera.  I LOVE the document camera!!!

I love all of their sweet illustrations! They were so excited to make this book - and they LOVE reading it to each other!

Another fun game we played in October was the "missing mouse game."  I think the name of it changed every time we played it! It is a really simple game to make, and I've made it with shapes and sight words before too.  For a thematic version, simply take your chosen clip art and program it with sight words, numbers, etc.  Make something to "hide" behind the numbers.  The children take turns saying the number to find out where the mouse it hiding.  I started simply with just 1-10, then did just teen numbers, and then all of the numbers.  To make it even more challenging, I mixed the numbers up!  The kids have a blast with this game!  I have also used calendar pieces as the number cards! It's already made for you - you can just make a small smiley to hide behind!

Monster FUN!!

We also had a lot of fun with monsters last week!  We read both of the books above as well as many other ones.  We read the book 10-Step Guide to Living With Your Monster.  The kids had so much fun with this book! We brainstormed different things we would need to do if a monster lived with us, and then we wrote a "how to" page if we lived with a monster!

 (Give him a bath)

(Teach him to sleep..not sure what she wrote after that!)

We brainstormed verbs and adjectives that describe monsters and wrote list poems.

 

We sang a fun monster song!  This picture is from my friend, Sheyna .. her great idea!  I forgot to snap a photo of mine!

 

 We also created a question web before we read Lenoardo the Terrible Monster and mad a story map in our reader's workshop journals for the book. The idea for this questioning web came from Kim Adsit's web site. You can also purchase many great blacklines for reader's workshop from Kim Adsit at her TPT store.  I use many of them - the kids love them and they help to elicit great conversations about books!

We also made monster glyphs! This idea is from Deanna Jump's Monsters packet on TPT.  It's a steal at only $3!!

Finally we water colored monsters! This was a directed drawing activity - the kids watched me draw the head (then they drew it), we drew the body (then they drew it)...and so on.  They added the eyes, mouth, spots, hair, etc. themselves.  I love how they all turned out so different!  Too cute!