Fun Books and Activities for October

Need some quick ideas to make October a cool month of reading? Look no further! I've got a few for you right here!

Monster fun with Go Away, Big Green Monster! 

Make your own books and story pieces of The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything.

Enjoy the beautiful weather with some autumn reading adventures and Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf.

Spider fun with The Itsy Bitsy Spider at home... or in the classroom.

Cool Stuff to do with Spooky Carrots.

Beautiful creations with Leafman.

New, Fabulous Halloween Book and Activity!

Charlotte Gunnufson sent us a copy of her new book Halloween Hustle and the kids and I have been enjoying it immensely. I have actually had to get onto my kids a bit about them dragging the book all over the house (and out to the car on errand trips), before I got a chance to post a review while the book still looked nice and new!

I planned to sit down and read and play with the book today with My Little Reader since it's aimed at kids around his age (he's in kindergarten). But my older son (9) couldn't resist the fun and wanted to join us too! 

I thought it would be fun to make our own little skeletons that could do the Halloween Hustle as we read the story, and fall down just like the skeleton in the book. My Little Reader decided he wanted to make a mummy like the one in the book. After some hard work, and a couple revisions, he had it the way he wanted. We each attached our creations to popsicle sticks for marionette-style puppets. 

I used simple white yarn (because that's what I had in my craft cabinet) to attach the mummy and skeleton to the popsicle stick handles. We punched holes and used twisty ties (again, using what I had handy) to make the puppets' joints move so they could hustle. 

Isn't that an adorable mummy? I think so!

The story is full of fun and whimsical Halloween-type characters that are headed to a party on Halloween night (warning: there is a zombie in the story that is a little on the gross side). While observing the cover, My Little Reader wondered how the skeleton would be able to dance without falling apart since he has no skin or muscles, and he was right on the money with his wonderings. Turns out the skeleton has quite the trouble staying put together as he dances through this tale. 

The rhyming text makes it lots of fun. And we love that it has a happy ending for the skeleton. 

And it really says something when my nine year old thinks a picture book is cool enough to sit and listen to mom read it. 

The skeleton would be easy enough to use even without the string and popsicle sticks attached. You could make the jointed skeleton out of card stock and simply let your child hold him with his hands and make him dance. Be sure you use card stock - I don't think regular paper, or even construction paper, would be heavy enough to work very well. 

I have included a pattern for the skeleton that I made (below). I do not have a pattern for the mummy My Little Reader made. But your little reader could make their own mummy, or could create a puppet based on another character in the book. You could make all the characters and do a puppet show of the story!

Check out the book trailer here!

And learn how to do the "Halloween Hustle" here!



Have fun! And I would love to see some pics of your puppets you make!

Beginning, Middle, End and A Spooky Month of Reading

My Literacy Launchpad students love a good spooky story... or a not-too-spooky story in this case. This month we learned about story structure and beginning, middle, end as we read some stories that had a hint of spook to them.

The month started out with some Creepy Carrots (Aaron Reynolds). What happens when a greedy little rabbit takes too many carrots from Crackenhopper Field? The carrots from Crackenhopper Field start following him and creeping him out... or do they? Is it just Jasper Rabbit's imagination? This one was the favorite for the month by a lot of my students. I loved reading it aloud, which was great because they asked me to read it many times over the course of the month! It's fun to vary my tone, volume, and inflections for dramatic effect with a spooky story!

We did a lot of practice with arranging the parts of Creepy Carrots in order - beginning, middle, end. The kids seemed to catch on really quickly to this concept. We made a poster where we broke up the parts of the story into beginning, middle, end. Then we made our own creepy carrots to take home with us, and put the parts of the story in the correct order on the back.

The next week we read Go Away, Big Green Monster (Ed Emberley)! Another hit with the kiddos! We read this one many times too! We played a game called "Monster Stomp" and then after our game we turned our classroom into a monster making factory. BUT... we weren't scared of our monsters. We could make them go away whenever we wanted. Plus, some of them were nice, friendly, smiling monsters. 

We continued to talk about story structure as we read The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything as our last story of the month. This read-aloud was hysterical, because I got some big jumps out of the students when I read the "Boo!!" part of the story to them! Every time! I love that. 

We had to remember all the parts of our story as we played a game where we pieced together the scarecrow from the book. We had a lot of laughs with that game, and got our scarecrow put together all handsome... errr scary! Then we made our own books. We had to remember again all the parts of the story, but we had the words in our books to help us. And now we can take our books home and make our friends and family jump when we read the "Boo!" part to them!

 

Spooooky Story Time... Wuuhhaa Ha Ha!

I received a request for Halloween story time ideas, so hopefully this post will be somewhat helpful for anyone in need of some spooktacular inspiration.

My October favorites include The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything (Linda Williams), The Teeny Tiny Woman (Paul Galdone), Go Away Big Green Monster (Ed Emberley), and Too Many Pumpkins (Linda White) & Pumpkin Pumpkin (Jeanne Titherington). The latter two, not so scary, but great October reads nonetheless.

These have been my favorites for a while now. As I'm typing this, I'm thinking it's probably time to branch out and add some new titles to the repertoire. So please leave your suggestions in the comment sections. I need some!!

Check out the photos below to see the fun time we had with our Little Old Lady inspired rebus readers last week. They had a fun pocket on the front for the children to store all their scarecrow pieces in. They each got to take their "book" (rebus reader) home and share the spooky story with others!

And read here and here for more info and ideas to correlate with my books suggestions above.