We have been having a BLAST with our October activities. With Halloween just around the corner, here are a few fun things you can do in your classroom. (And some ideas to help students stay engaged during your academic lessons in October.)
1. Scrubbing Pumpkins
This is a SIMPLE activity beloved by my students. I simply set up a washing station including a few items:
-a basket of mini pumpkins
-a tray with a pitcher, a small mason jar, and a scrub brush (The order is important as it reminds students the order to do things. First they fill up the pitcher of water and then pour it into the mason jar. Next they add one pump of soap to their scrub brush, then they scrub their pumpkin.)
My students work on the second tray and scrub until they think their pumpkin is clean!
After it has been scrubbed, they dry it off and then get to “decorate the classroom” with their clean pumpkin.
Cheap, easy, and a HUGE hit!
2.Spider egg sacs
For this activity you will need white yarn, Elmer’s White glue, and balloons.
In a bowl combine about a 1/4 of a cup of glue with a dash of water. Stir it up and then add the yarn into the bowl. For each student I gave them about 50 inches of yarn. We then took out the (now very wet!) yarn and placed it onto a tray. My students carefully wrapped their balloon with the yarn. If it knotted up, I helped them unknot it. (I had a parent volunteer come in to help me with this project. We each managed 4 students at a time while the rest of the class was at centers.)
After all the yarn had been wrapped around the balloons, I hung them up to dry over night. The next morning, I popped the balloons and added a plastic spiderling to each egg sac. The kids came in to find their egg sacs on their desks in the morning. They were beyond excited!!
3.Decomposing numbers with spiderlings
For this activity, I gave each child a
plastic Easter egg “egg sac” filled with plastic spiders. My students then had to count up their spiders and place them on their spider web worksheet that I made for them. They then practiced decomposing their number of spiderlings!
To do this, I showed them how to put some spiderlings on one side of the paper and the rest on the other side. After they did this, they wrote down their equations.
4.Write About It!
As I teach at a Christian school, we don’t celebrate Halloween at school. However, many of our students are VERY excited about all things October. Therefore, to help give them an outlet, I let my students write all about their favorite things to do in October.
(I like pumpkins.)
(I am trick or treating.)
5. Read Fun Books
A friend of mine came into my classroom this Friday and said to me, “Wow… you have a lot of books for October!” I had to laugh because I may have a bit of a problem with buying books for my classroom. However, this small obsession of mine works in my best interest. My students LOVE listening to themed stories and they are a great way to increase engagement! Reading these stories is a great way to work on the comprehension topics your are discussing during your language lessons!
6. Interactive Centers
Kindergarten students LOVE to move! I use this to my advantage and set up centers that encourage my students to walk around the classroom. I put up this spider web and it is the biggest hit in my classroom.
As a center, my students read the words on the web and record them on their “write the room” recording page. On this page, students sort the words by the vowel in them.
7. Make an edible (healthy!) snack!
For this activity, I simply gave each student a “Cutie” and had them draw a face on it! They loved the idea of turning their cutie into a jack-o-lantern!
Opening the cutie also helps develop those fine motor skills!!
We also decorated the classroom with writing activities, crafts, and a shared writing activity inspired from Vickie Plant’s pumpkin activity from the blog Primary Press!
I hope you can use some of these ideas this week!