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.