We're Not Scared!

Ghosts? Witches? Monsters? You can't scare us.  We learned the difference between real and make-believe this week and found out that all those spooky things at Halloween can't hurt us because they're not real. 

By the way, if you hear your child singing some kind of spooky song this weekend, chances are its one of these two.

We made a tally chart to see who was afraid of spiders. Then the students wrote in their journals to tell what they were scared of. 

Tommy is scared of spiders.

Sophia is scared of snakes. 

We had some special Halloween-themed centers this week. In the math games center, the students played a trick-or-treat board game. The concept was similar to last week's pumpkin patch game.  They chose their character, rolled the dice, and traveled that many spaces down the sidewalk. All of the regular-looking houses were marked with a +1, +2, or a +3 and they collected that many pieces of candy.  But if they landed on a haunted house, they lost candy (either a -1, -2, or -3.) If they landed on a dog house or a barn, they had a +0.  Adding and subtracting zero on worksheets can be rather confusing at this age. You wouldn't think so - but it always stumps some.  But when playing a game with manipulatives, the concept comes much more easily. 

The students counted skulls to make potions and put together mini-number puzzles where the tally marks were bones!

They matched up capital and lowercase letters with their sounds in the puzzle center.

And they played "Spooky Scoopy Sight Words" in the word work center. They used tong scoopers to scoop letters out of the jack-o-lantern. They placed the letters onto the word mats to make the sight words. 

As if all this Halloween stuff wasn't exciting enough, this week was also Red Ribbon Week. On Monday, the students came in with their crazy hair and crazy socks.

It was also the last color day, gray day.

The next day was hat day.

 Then came Friday - dress as your favorite storybook character day. 

I was Mrs. Large from a little known children's book, "Five Minutes Peace." It was one of my favorites growing up.  I didn't understand it then. I most certainly do now. 

The students got all dressed up, too. The AM class got to watch/be a part of a costume parade throughout the halls.

 We finished up Fun Friday with a simple but fun art project. 

 I'll leave you with some adorably frightening pics and a video of the PM class performing the Thriller dance they learned from Mr. B.