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! 

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Tricks & Treats from Enchanted Kinder Garden

It's finally fall and I love everything that October brings. With that in mind, my favorite thing to teach is pumpkins. I'm not sure why, but I love all of the exploring, the new learning, the investigations and everything that pumpkins bring to my classroom. It's always been one of my favorites and will continue to be. 

My first must have book is Piggie Pie. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book. In the story, a witch wants some piggie pie, but she doesn't have ONE ingredient. The story takes you through all of the craziness that the pigs do to stay hidden from the witch. I always tell my kids that I luckily found some pigs and we're going to make piggie pie. *insert everyone freaking out* We actually make pumpkin pie in a cup, but my kids don't know it. I crush and set everything up before we read the story. This way, they don't see any boxes that tell what it is they're really eating. It is hilarious to see them make such funny faces. We respond to the story with  a what would they do if they were the pigs. It's always fun to allow the children to place themselves inside of the book and become that character. In this case, they were a group of pigs that did not want to become pie for the witch.

My second is Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie. If you're in need of a book that has some great pictures - this is one of them! It shows some very detailed pictures of the life cycle and things that can be made from pumpkins.

A few other fun books include I Like Pumpkins, The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, From Seed to Pumpkin, The Legend of Spookley The Square Pumpkin and Pumpkin Town. Pumpkin Town is a favorite for me to use to teach sequence. It's about some brothers that plant seeds and mistakenly throw them over into the next town. The seeds land EVERYWHERE and creates a town full of pumpkins.

I have a HUGE collection of fall/October themed books. The reason that I love October themes so much is because they're so much fun to teach and they're so easy to plan. I have a few different reading response sheets and learning sheets to help you get through the month of October. See it as my treat to you!

I absolutely love the story I Need my Monster! I got this book after October last year through Donor's Choose. It's about a boy who usually has a monster under his bed. Well, the monster goes on a little trip and the boy just HAS to have his monster back. It goes through various monsters and is a really neat and funny book to read.

We talked about what would make a scary monster and responded to the story and made an easy craft. The response sheet can be downloaded above. The monster craft can be downloaded here:

You can grab the freebie here.

Tricks and Treats Blog Hop

It's October, which means Halloween and Trick or Treating are just around the corner.  Before you're recovering from any school festivities you have planned, here at the Elementary Entourage we wanted to share an awesome weekend of Teaching Tricks and Treats with you!  Here is how it will work. We will each be sharing some of our favorite teaching tricks along with some treats just for you! We hope that you will hop from one blog to another to get some new ideas and sweet treats.

So get your goodie bags ready for lots of freebies, sales, and giveaways, you definitely wont want to miss everything we've got in store for you!

*If you are a blogger, we'd love to have you join us in sharing your favorite teaching trick and a treat for our teaching friends. To join in on the fun please check out the details for linking up here.

An InLinkz Link-up