Halloween fun and ABC and Personal Narrative culminating projects

Week 9

The week before Fall Break is always a bit wonky with a half day off for our Halloween Carnival and teachers busily wrapping up units. We enjoyed some Halloween videos, and grades 1 and 2 worked on culminating projects that will be finished after the break. (I HOPE!!)

PreK 3 - Guiding Question: What Halloween words do we remember?

We watched a film version of Pumpkin Eye, by Denise Fleming, which zooms in on details in the pictures of this Halloween rhyme. It makes a good review of some of the words we've been talking about: costumes, trick-or-treat, mummy, jack-o-lantern and more. Because the narration is slow, there are plenty of places for students to repeat the words they hear or for the teacher to ask clarifying questions. 

My copy of the book was checked out at the time, but it would be best to read the story beforehand and then show the clip. It's also best to read this with youngsters who are somewhat familiar with Halloween since the overall mood is dark and spooky.

PreK 4 and Kindergarten - Guiding Question: What's a series? What will be we for Halloween?

Kindergarteners have been learning about series books, so we talked about the popular book and TV series, Charlie and Lola. In this charming episode, Lola has two problems to solve. I asked students to watch for these problems and be ready to tell about them at the end. She needs to figure out what to wear for Halloween, and she and her friends need to deal with the big disappointment of having their much-loved jack-o-lantern ruined by accident.

After the film, many students took home some Charlie and Lola books!

We also played "Who Stole the Candy from the Trick-or-Treat Bag?" using some cute character cards from the PreK Pages. I saved it onto my wiki under "holidays."

Grade 1 - Guiding Question: What places begin with different alphabet letters?

Alphabet Books board

We began filming of our alphabet movies. 

But... fire drills and various interruptions conspired to keep us from finishing! We will complete our movies after the vacation.

Grade 2 - Guiding Question: Why is this story personal narrative? Which is the most important part of the story?

Students' choice from The Wednesday Surprise

We began our VoiceThread projects by working in small groups to review the stories we read during the unit. Each group needs to answer two questions:

- Why is this book an example of a personal narrative story?

- What is the most important part of the story?

Everyone in the group needed to agree on the most important part

Today, we selected the most important part of the story. The photos of the pages will be added to our VoiceThread slideshow. Next session, each group will record their ideas along with pictures.

Here are some photos of the pages students selected to mark the most important part in their story. They did an amazing job of remembering each text and tapping into the emotional content of each story.

The key page from Wilfred Gordon MacDonald Partridge

Grades 3, 4, 5 - Check out extra books for the vacation!

Photos by Elise

Grade 2 and 5 students paired up for some impromptu reading time. Here are some photos of them reading to each other: sometimes the fifth grader is reading and sometimes the second grader is reading.