Tricks and Treats (with The Friendly Teacher)

 This time of year students begin to lose some of their engagement. It is the time right around the holidays were you need to up your engagement strategies. This lesson was a HIT in my classroom! Students were working so hard on text evidence, text features, main idea and detail and more! The best part of this bat lesson is that you can do it on anything you want to! This is a way to get your students to review any standard that you need too!

Here is what you do!
*Create a bat cave on your door. All I did was crunch up black paper and made it look like a cave.
*Tell your students to wear all black and bring a flash light. The key here is to not tell them why. It will add suspense and your students will be talking about it at home all night long.
*You can create a cave inside your classroom or you can just  turn the lights off and put a cave picture on your smart board. This is the area where you can go far out and create something awesome or you can just keep it simple!
*Create wings for yourself. All you do is take a black piece of paper, fold it in half, then cut triangles out of one side! You have two wings! (I was going to take pictures of this, but it was so easy I felt like you all would think I was silly ;))
*Rip your bat wing in several places.
*Run into the classroom telling your students that you were flying and your wing got caught on a tree. It is ripped and you cannot fly any longer. The only way to fix it is if all of your bat family works hard to help you. Their job is to finish the assignment at hand correctly. If they do, they receive a piece of tape to help fix your wing. To fix the entire wing each person/group will have to complete the activity.
*Students complete whatever you give them. (For me, I had lots of passages with questions to answer) Then, when they get them all correct you hand them a piece of tape and they tape a spot on your wing. Once everyone is done your wing is fixed.

Extras:
**When they got done they got to read Halloween books and eat Bat Poop. (Chocolate Raisins)
**When everyone got done we watched a small Halloween show!
**We had every student make bat wings and tape them on their backs and they LOVED it!

My favorite fall activity is to have my students color a pumpkin. Once they color their pumpkin they write a how-to writing on how they colored their pumpkin. Then, they give the writing to one of their friends in the classroom. That friend tries to color the exact same pumpkin. This is a great lesson to teach students the importance of adding detail in their how-to writing pieces. My newsletter followers received this for free last month and now you can also grab it for FREE here! 

(If you want more freebies like this sign up for my newsletter here)