I'll be perfectly honest, I was never a fan of Halloween. However, as I teacher, I capitalize on the idea of Halloween as much as I can and use it as an opportunity to spice up my instruction and pique students' interest. One of my primary vehicles is through literature, and I shared some of my favorite books, both funny and spooky, in a previous post. I also include poetry as well, and during the month of October Room 17 had fun memorizing and reciting the traditional "In A Dark, Dark Wood" and "I'm Not Scared!" by Karen Baiker. Practicing these poems develops fluency in reading and confidence in speaking in front of an audience. Something wonderful happened a couple weekends ago when I happily rediscovered some material from my old lesson plan files. It was a copy of an excerpt from Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches' chant "Double, double, toil and trouble." I used to give this to fourth graders to memorize, and I thought, why not try it with my 2nd graders? I gave a very brief and general summary of the Macbeth story, and concluded by sharing film composer John Williams' rendition of "Double, double, toil and trouble" from the movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." You can listen to this catchy and delightfully wicked song here: We later used this goodie from Shakespeare as inspiration for writing our own recipes for magic potions. Besides this piece of music, I draw on other music that has long been associated with Halloween, including "Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns and "Toccata and Fugue in d" by Johan Sebastian Bach. "Danse Macabre" was a particular favorite this year, and we had a devilishly good time doing some impromptu writing while listening to it. We even got to dance to it, thanks to our wonderful dance instructor, Ms. Devon Wall, who taught us how to freeze into all sorts of marvelous shapes with our bodies based on a broom, a trick-or-treat bag, a witch's hat, and a jack-o-lantern. Of course, there must be visual art in the mix. Students used chalk pastels to make spider web drawings and the following week, pumpkin patch landscapes with oil pastel: We wrapped up our Halloween funfest by making origami ghosts. They were deemed "simple" on the YouTube video where I learned it, but was quite a bit more complicated for my 2nd graders. Even so, they still found it engaging and, despite a bit of frustration, seemed determined to get all the steps down. Thankfully, I had two parent volunteers who were able to help the children with the trickier folds. The bubbling excitement from the students from all these activities is quite contagious. It almost made me like Halloween . . . almost!
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The month of October begins one of my favorite stretches of teaching in the school year. All the festivities that we associate with the upcoming holidays in the fall and winter enliven our classroom with lessons and activities that get me and the students fired up to learn. At the beginning of this month, I began reading spooky tales. One that is always wildly popular, hands-down, is the old favorite, Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark, a collection of traditional folklore and short stories retold by Alvin Schwartz. Whenever we visit the school library, my students race to be the first ones to check out this book--unless, of course, it has already been checked out by someone from another class. These are awesome stories--simple, riveting, dramatic, and perfect for transitions or short breaks between lessons. They are even better when one turns off the lights and reads them only by the glow of a flashlight! Another book in my storytelling toolbox for Halloween is Scared Witless, a collection of spooky stories by Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss. This one has a more lighthearted, humorous feel than Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. To throw in a bit more fun with a different cultural experience, I also read a few short chapters from a French children's chapter book called Les Portes Tordues, or The Twisted Doors. It is a bilingual French/English book that actually is designed in a very clever way to teach French grammar and vocabulary within the narrative frame of a girl lost in a haunted house. I don't exactly read it to teach my students French, and unfortunately there is never enough time to read the entire book, but I read it as a brief opportunity for the children to hear another language (I do read both the French and English translations to help their comprehension). In some years when I taught classes with many second language learners, I also used it as an opportunity to teach those who are native English speakers to ask themselves, "What would it be like going to school in another country where I didn't know the language?" My new discovery this year was a book by the hilariously original and witty Dav Pilkey, who wrote The Hallo-wiener. It's about a dachshund named Oscar who is teased by the other dogs because of his short stature. On Halloween he takes more ridicule than ever in his hot-dog costume, but one brave act makes him a hero. It was a nice tie-in with our Treasures unit on "Community Heroes," and also allowed me to allude (perhaps all too briefly) to the fact that this month happens to be National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. So there you have it, my list of Halloween-related literature for the classroom. I certainly welcome any other book recommendations you may have.
With the emphasis on the Common Core Standards coming down the pipeline, I've been on the lookout for good nonfiction to use for read aloud time, as well as literature that can be used across the disciplines. Here are a few I've read to the class in recent weeks that specifically address social studies:
And here are the children's learnings we charted after reading: A third book that made quite an impression on the class this month was Jane Yolen's Encounter, a retelling of Christopher Columbus's landing in the Americas told from the perspective of one of the natives. I first showed the class a cute, brief video that rehashed the general details that everyone is familiar with in terms of the historical context of Columbus Day. Then as we settled down to read Encounter, I made a point of explaining to my students that the way we view events in history depends a lot on a person's point of view. In this case, the young native boy who tells the story about Europeans coming and taking away his people's land and culture tells his side of the story in a very tragic way. The story is quite poignant, told in a lyrical style, and great for teaching students the literary concept of point of view. As one of the boys in my class declared after we had finished and were heading out to P.E., "Ms. Long, that story was sooo sad!" (After this comment, I did make a mental note to read something humorous the next day.)
I only just now discovered National Day on Writing, the United States' national celebration of writing which first took place on October 20, 2009. How cool is that? The celebration invites Americans to consider the role of writing in everyday life. Here are a few witty student responses to the question: Why do we have to write today? For a more detailed list of student answers, visit Edutopia. These are brilliant!
This month in Room 17, we're currently learning how to craft spooky stories. We've been practicing "snapshots," parts of a narrative that describe characters, objects, and settings with rich sensory detail. And this afternoon, we delved into how to craft an engaging lead, or beginning that can hook an audience into reading the rest of the story. Here were a few examples from my students, followed by the specific writing technique they used: "My eyes opened. It was a gooey, squishy, smooth jello monster." (snapshot) "'Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" screamed Nicole. "Help!"' (dialogue) "Shablaam!! Show dashed through the ice outside and cracked my window." (sound effect) "In the dark I saw a one-eyed monster." (snapshot) "Ding, dong. 'Who is it?' I asked. 'It's me,' someone said in a scratchy old voice." (dialogue) "My heart was about to pop out of my chest!" (feeling) These story leads are quite a dramatic improvement from "One day . . ." or "Once upon a time . . . ." We had Author's Chair after our writer's workshop and many of my children were so enthusiastic about sharing the different writing techniques they used, it was impossible to squeeze them all in. Can't wait to see what else these young writers create with their imaginations. After eleven years of having students complete the prosaic grammar and math review worksheets when they walk through the door each morning, I finally grew weary and thought it was time to spice up our morning warm-up routine. On Monday, I give students a math riddle or puzzle, hence the new moniker, Math Riddle Mondays. And Thursday has now become Think Outside the Box Thursday, the day on which students are challenged to stretch their creativity and make a shape that no one else can think of. We started a few weeks ago with this shape: Students could turn the paper any which way they pleased. Here are some fabulous samples: Here are some Think Outside the Box shapes done in subsequent weeks: When students finish drawing their shapes they write about them using a simple sentence frame: "I turned my shape into a _________________." It's a fun and engaging way to start our Thursday, and the students look forward to seeing what shape I give them each week. Their ideas have been pure fabulousness!
Last spring, a student gave me a little stuffed animal otter, which my class named Eddie. A sudden brainstorm hit me and I decided to use Eddie as a tool for classroom management. "Eddie the otter enjoys spending time with quiet students," I announced one morning, and thus began the morning routine of giving him to a different child each day to keep at their desk, as long as that student remained quiet and followed directions. If a child became too talkative or showed any form of misbehavior, our fuzzy friend was promptly taken away and placed back on the teacher's desk, or handed to another student. Eddie truly has become an integral member of the Room 17 community. I know this because, if I ever forget to give him to a student, someone in the class will inevitably ask, "Who gets Eddie today?" This year, I've been able to expand Eddie's involvement in the classroom into the realm of writing. He has become Room 17's favorite writing topic. We started off by developing his character with a circle map, with me modeling my own: After thinking of ideas to describe Eddie, we then began regular writing sessions about Eddie in the form of journal entries. We call them The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter. I gather the class on the carpet, and explain to them about diaries and journals, and the format of a diary entry with a date, greeting, and closing. On chart paper, I do a form of interactive writing with the children, eliciting ideas for sentences we could write from Eddie's point of view, as if he were actually writing in his own diary. I even call on students to come up and write words or add punctuation themselves to a sentence or paragraph, involving them directly and physically with the writing. I encourage the students to think like powerful writers, using vivid and concrete details to describe Eddie's day. Here are a couple samples: As independent writing practice, I occasionally have the class copy a diary entry and illustrate it. They've also written their own individual entries "by Eddie" in their own writing journals, and each one is so different! We've only done five or so entries for Eddie as a class thus far. I'm very curious to see where The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter will take me and my students as we continue our writing adventures with him into the year.
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