The Most Fun Week of the Year!

Yes, you actually read that title correctly.  A teacher who loves Halloween week....can you believe it?? I don't know how you feel about it or how the teachers in your building do, but I can say I hear a lot of dread and complaining.  Come on people!  We loved Halloween when we were kids.  It was a magical night of dressing up and getting more candy than we had the whole rest of the year!  So teachers this is a friendly PSA--Let's not forget that excitement WE once felt....whether it was on a Saturday or a Wednesday!  Let your kiddos get excited....maybe even join in.

Anyway...the sisters and I have a fun week planned and I wanted to share a little overview with you!  Between beginning of the year stuff, reading testing, teaching behavior expectations and routines, and our rigorous math program, we haven't exactly had a ton of "free" time for fun things.  My room was looking B-A-R-E.  Let's face it, kids need some down time to have a little fun here and there between all the "must-dos" and my class needed a Halloween face lift!  So last week I squeezed in a simple craft of making pumpkins.  Believe it or not, the class loved the simplicity and were so creative when they knew they could do whatever they wanted!  I got big pumpkins, small pumpkins, pumpkins with baseball hats, and pumpkins with eyelashes!  I loved their creativity and they loved that there were basically no directions!  I hung these on a bulletin board in the hallway and titled it "We're a Perfect Patch of Pumpkins."  I was starting to feel more in the spirit of the upcoming holiday.  I decided to also squeeze in writing Halloween stories.  As Amy has been telling you, we have adopted a new way of teaching writing so far this year.  It allows the students to write about whatever they want....I just slightly encouraged them to try a Halloween story when we were learning about question leads.  Of course they all got super excited.  They weren't masterpieces of perfection but they loved writing them so we did a final copy and they made story toppers out of our Halloween unit.  You can find that unit here or by clicking on the picture below if you want to make these or incorporate lots of different Halloween ideas into your learning this week.  

Now that these are hanging in my room, it's onto the BIG week!  We decided to put the regular routine on hold somewhat to have THEME week!  Each day this week has a theme that goes along with Halloween. We made sure to include all of the things we were going to learn anyway, just put a fun holiday spin on them.  Nothing says "exciting" to 7 and 8 year olds more than "special days."  We used to do a huge bat unit that we worked on for a few weeks.  We loved it, the kiddos loved it.  But then we realized Kindergarten did it and so did 1st grade and we wanted to do something new for them.  So last year we did a shorter study of spiders.  We loved it, the kiddos loved it but now we see lots of those in the halls already this year.....trendy perhaps?!?  So we came up with a way to still do a little of each.  Check out our themes for this week....

Monday- Spooky Spiders
Tuesday- Batty Bats (including Bat'tastic activities)
Wednesday- Pumpkin Play (including pumpkin science activities)
Thursday- Witch's Brew (including Room on the Broom strategies)
Friday- Halloween Fun

We will check back in with you to show you a little of what we did for each theme day....and include some pics!

I have not been more excited about a Monday since last June! :)

Now you tell us....what's your favorite way to incorporate Halloween into your classroom learning?

~Tina