Halloween!

So October is officially here!  

You can look forward to the crisp cool mornings and the beautiful fall leaves. I love this season and everything about Halloween! I still love to carve pumpkins, do all the fall activities that kids do, and try anything that has the flavor of pumpkin!  Do you know how many items you can eat that comes in pumpkin flavor??

I created Octoberfest (for kids!) for some fun and engaging learning activities for kids K-1.  If you grab it this month, there's a bonus inside for you!

Octoberfest For Kids includes over 110 pages of math, language arts, science, writing, and art activities. It has 4 emergent readers (non fiction and fiction) and is aligned to the CC.

You can grab it here and get a FREEBIE too!

  

                                       

 Here are a few previews:

Practice missing addends with manipulatives

Non-Fiction & Fiction Emergent Readers

 (with an interactive book that teaches positional words)

Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Matching Activity

 *NEW* Label It! Activities- children practice the skill of labeling (this is one of my best selling items - see Label It! in my store for a closer view of this type of activity)

Grab a FREEBIE Color by Code Here!

Some other fall activities to enjoy:

You can keep them as leaves and measure them to see who has the longest leaf or create a picture with them!

 This month, we're working on non-fiction text features.  I decided to have the kids work on creating their own book about bats.  This tied in nicely with Halloween and the kids were so fascinated by bats.

In the beginning, students created a web with all the things they knew about bats. 

We read a lot of books about bats (both non-fiction and fiction) and learned how to take notes using a 'can, have and are' organizer.
We used the following books that were great for note-taking.

I liked this book because it was written in a Question & Answer format and was very simple for kids to understand.  It's also great for teaching what types of questions you would want to find out about bats.

These are some great  books available from Scholastic Books.

Amazing Bats is great for note taking for older kids. Below are other great books:

Stellaluna is a favorite book of mine.  You can have your class listen to it on storylineonline.  Sometimes it's nice for them to hear someone else's voice =) Click here for the book.
After Stellaluna, students compared the attributes of bats and birds.

We read this non-fiction reader about bats.  It's an interactive book where students identify and add in the missing text features on the pages in the book (not shown below). Comprehension questions and non-fiction text feature match up is included.

Here are some of the notes the kids took after reading some bat books.

Check them out!

Then, using their notes, students created a rough draft outline for their writing and then worked on their final draft. There is another outline enclosed for students who need more guidance.

 The kids followed these directions to draw a bat and cut it out for their front cover.

This bat is hanging upside down!  Pretty creative kids!

We labeled a diagram from a bat I made.  

Here's a final product!

Create your own Bat Unit in your class. 

Check out BATS here:

Here's  a preview:

Here are some adorable bat crafts/treats to go with this unit:

Check the original pin out here.

Check the original pin out here.

Check the original pin out here.

Check the original pin out here.

MORE FUN HALLOWEEN IDEAS

The kids loved all the Halloween snacks and crafts, but my favorite healthy snacks were these:

Pumpkins:
Clementines with celery sticks

Ghosts:

Bananas with chocolate chips (mini chocolate chips for the eyes and regular chips for the mouth!)