MB Halloween

Fun with Story and Language in Mrs. Bezubiak's Class

Halloween

Halloween is such a wonderful opportunity to explore with language, nature and fiction. I take this opportunity to read fun make believe stories to introduce them to fiction and rhyme. Some stories that I love to read are:

Title	Author	Illustrator
Shake dem Halloween Bones	W. Nikola-Lisa	Mike Reid
Dem Bones	Bob Barner
Bat Jamboree	Kathi Appelt	Melissa Sweet
Too Many Pumpkins	Linda White	Megan Lloyd
Night Noises	Mem Fox
We're Going on a Ghost Hunt	Marcia Vaughan	Ann Schweninger
The Ghost Eye Tree	Bill Martin Jr. & John Archambault	Ted Rand
The 13 Nights of Halloween	Rebecca Dickinson
The Night Before Halloween	Natasha Wing	Cynthia Fisher
The Itsy Bitsy Spider	Iza Trapani
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything	Linda Williams	Megan Lloyd
Stellaluna	Janell Cannon
Room on the Broom	Julia Donaldson	Axel Scheffler
One Halloween Night	Mark Teague
Big Pumpkin	Erica Silverman	S.D. Schindler

I believe that stories need to come alive for children. I like to incorporate sounds, music, puppets and drama into story. Some ideas that are fun, interactive and help children develop their oral language and sense of story are:

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
by Linda Williams and Illustrated by Megan Lloyd.

With this story it is fun to bring in props for the children to use to act out the story. I will bring in a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, a shirt, 2 white gloves, a tall black hat and a stuffed pumpkin head. I will also have a hat and a basket for one of the students to dress up like the little old lady.

After the children are familiar with the story I ask some children to volunteer to act out the sequence of the story. I am the narrator and the children become the story tellers. I also let the children know that the students are the story tellers and that the story may change and that it is O.K for us to add or make up our own story.

An extension to the story is to have the children draw the different symbols (hat, shoes, pants, shirt, gloves, pumpkin head) on paper, cut them out and to tape them on popsicle sticks. The children can then retell the story with their puppets.

These activities provide opportunities for sequencing, first and last, ordinal numbers, story telling, beginning, middle and end, art and enjoyment of story.

The Thirteen Nights of Halloween
by Natasha Wing

Almost immediately the children recognize the tune of the story and bring in their prior knowledge to see the connection to the 12 Days of Christmas. We have fun with this story because we make the sounds of the different creatures as we are reading the story. After the first read I talk to the children about the different creatures and how some of them are fictional and others are not. We talk about what sounds they may make or actions they do. On the second read I ask the students to make 2 sounds for each creature in the story.

This year the sounds and actions the students came up with were:

Creature	Sound or Action
A spooky owl in a gnarled tree.	sound: Ooo Ooo
Two hairy toads	sound: Ribit Ribit
Three jack-o'-lanterns	action: hands open and closing x2
Four cackling witches	sound:2 cackle laughs
Five pounds of worms	sound:Yuck!
Six spiders spinning	action: hands rolling x2
Seven lizards creeping	action: stick tongue out x2
Eight werewolves howling	sound:2 howls
Nine bats a-flying	action: hands flapping like wings
Ten skeletons rattling	action: body shaking
Eleven black cats hissing	sound:2 hissing sounds
Twelve vampires nibbling	sound: nibbling sounds
Thirteen ghosts a-booing	sound: Boo Boo

One of the activities I like to use to help the children develop their sense of rhyme is a song in my pocket chart. I like to change the song "Oh! A hunting we will go" to "Oh! A haunting we will go". I write the words in the pocket chart and I have colored rhyming pictures that the students can select to create the rhyme.
I like to use poetry to develop the students emergent reading skills. When we are reading our poems, I am tracking with a pointer left to right and top to bottom. I also ask the children about the punctuation and talk to them about expression when reading. The students notice the rhymes in the poems as well.
To further develop their emergent reading skills, I have little pattern stories for them to read. The simple stories follow a pattern to insure success and the children feel very confident. I had purchased witch fingers from the dollar store for each child to put on their reading finger. The students had fun tracking with their reading fingers and used their reading fingers for reading around the room and other stories.