Even though I do not do too many activities to celebrate Halloween with my students, I have collected a few activities to create with students.

Nounsters Writing Project

HalloWeiner Readers Theater

Monsters In a Jar Writing Project

Pumpkin Math

Glyphs and Other Cool Ideas

Nounsters Writing Project

This is a writing project I inherited from a wonderful teacher that retired.  My fourth graders loved it!  Click here to read more.

HalloWeiner Readers Theater

This is a hilarious readers theater from the story Halloweiner by Dav Pilkey.  Click here to see the script.

Monsters In a Jar Writing Project

My class is actually in the mist of this project right now.  I got this idea from the Second Grade MSN Club and Teresa Wilson's third grade website.

First I read the wonderful story called Monster Trap by Dean Morrissey. This an adorable story about a little boy that comes to stay with his grandfather.  The boys is convinced they have monsters (he hears noises at night) and he and his grandfather build several traps trying to catch the elusive monsters.  The pictures are beautiful and I really liked them because they (and the story) were not frightening at all.

After I read the story I give each student a copy of the jar, pretending that we have caught a monster and trapped it.   I ask students to draw and color a picture of their monsters.  The kids LOVE this.  Then the next day I model how to create a web about their monster.  I purposely keep the category bubble s blank so that we can brainstorm these together. We create a list of possible categories to put on our web.  The students then create their webs and then it is time to start out first drafts.  I like using the webs because it is a great introduction to what paragraphs are.  My second graders can't do it independently, BUT they can finally tell me WHAT a paragraph IS! We talk about what are the most important categories the reader needs to know.  My students decided that the reader needed to know how we caught it and what it looks like, or a description.  I modeled this.  When students finish, they will write the final drafts on the lined jar paper and we will make a class book.

Below are pictures of the model writing that our class created as we wrote the Monster in a Jar story as well as the web we wrote from.

Here is a picture of the web we created.  Students brainstormed "categories" which would later turn into paragraphs.	Description of the monster
How the monster was caught	How the monster is cared for
Food the monster eats

Pumpkin Math

This year with my second graders I  decided to try to do the whole pumpkin math activities.  Since I have only taught language arts, I was excited to be able to try this new activity!  I looked and looked online and could not find any activity sheets that really meet my students needs and what I wanted to accomplish with this activity.

I enlisted the help of two parents.  I brought several bowls, scrapers and spoons, a knife to cut off the top and a scale   (I actually forgot this at home- I am writing this to remind myself for next year!!!!).  We did this right after recess during our math time so that parents could set up and spread out newspapers on the desks.

Students completed this sheet as we went along. It took us about an hour and twenty minutes.  The counting of the seeds took most of the time!

Glyphs and Other Cool Ideas

I actually did not create any glyphs for Halloween this year, but I most definitely will next year.  I found a couple really good ones that I will be able to adjust.  Also, my students were studying mapping skills at this time, so we completed several map coordinate grid activities that were cute.

All the links below are from www.mathwire.com.

Jack-O -Lantern Glyph

Another Jack-O-Lantern Glyph

Jack-O- Lantern Coordinate Grid Sheet

Mad Monster Coordinate Grid Sheet

Grab the Candy Corn Coordinate Grid Game