Let's talk about Halloween + freebies!

It's Halloween week! Or rather, it's been Halloween week and I've just been a little bit too busy to blog. But fear not, I have some juicy things to talk about today! 

One of my favorite parts about our ELA block is the read alouds, and since I'm in charge of the read aloud plans for my grade level team, I chose a variety of Halloween-themed books for this week. Also as a rule with read alouds, I try to incorporate some sort of follow-up writing activity or craft. This week, I saved the crafts for our Halloween party and stuck with writing pieces. These are the books we are reading this week!

We read this story twice. The first day, we responded by completing a beginning, middle, and end graphic organizer to summarize the story and the second day, we talked about what the central message of the story was.

My students loved this book! They especially loved the "mysterious dark figure" who delivered a note to Farmer Brown :) After reading this book, we wrote our own invitations to our Halloween party to give to our families. You can grab a copy HERE.

For the two books listed above, they tell the same story of Halloween monsters getting ready for kiddy trick-or-treaters and in the end, the children get too scared because they realize the monsters aren't wearing costumes at all! So the monsters then enjoy their own party by themselves and have a great time. For the follow-up activity, we compared the two stories together and talked about how they were similar and different and then, students picked their favorite version and explained to a partner why it was their favorite.

*  *  *

Still on the topic of Halloween, quite frankly I was feeling a little lazy this year when it came to drawing my Halloween treat labels so I created some on Powerpoint using Creative Clips adorable Halloween cliparts and uploaded them in my store for your particular use. Click on the picture below to get them!

Back to the topic of read alouds, what are your favorite Halloween read alouds and activities you do with them? I know there are a ton of great ones out there and I can't wait to switch them up next year!