I’m always a bit late with my posts, so hopefully this is helpful to those of you looking for Halloween literacy centers in October 2023 LOL! This is a round up of what I love to use in my classroom for literacy in October. The best part about October is all the fun manipulatives that you can grab at the Dollar Tree to make things more fun! Take a peek at my centers – I hope you find some ideas useful! If you want to check them out to purchase, you can click the pictures!
Every month I send home an at home Reading Bingo. These are themed reading challenges. They come with a half page reflection sheet that I ask families to send back. Students LOVE sharing these with the class. They get to say which challenge was their favourite and why, and which book was their favourite and why. This has tremendously increased my at home reading participation!!!
These are great for your students that need some fine motor practice. They get to work on tracing letters, writing simple sentences and there are also pathways and themed pictures to trace too!
This center is always a hit for my Word Work! Students pick out the sightword card and then build it with ghosts. You can edit the sightwords to be any words you are working on! Sometimes I do names too! This comes in a holiday bundle so you can change it up with the holidays!
These CVC Word Mats are a step up from the build a sight word! Students practice spelling cvc words. I use magnet letters, but you could laminate and use dry erase too! This comes with 120 CVC picture cards and 70 mats! The mats change with the season/holiday. Makes switching up this center SUPER easy. Re-use the picture cards and just swap out the mats!
These letter tiles make a super low prep whole group game! Grab a pocket chart and put letters into it face out. Then hide one of the 13 themed objects behind 1 or 2 letters. Have students identify the letter/sound and then upon successfully doing so, check behind to see if they found a hidden object! These come with uppercase and lowercase letters, great for matching too! Even though this is a literacy post, I feel it worth noting, these also come with numbers 1-31!
Write the Room is one of my students absolute FAVOURITE centers! We put a recording chart onto clipboards and hide the words around the room. Then students get to go on a word scavenger hunt! They find the word and write it and bring me a completed clipboard for a prize (normally a sticker, or a piece of candy corn… nothing major!). I put the vocabulary picture charts and the word wall words out in our writing studio with this themed writing paper too! An easy way to encourage writing independence.
These sightword booklets are an easy independent center. I put them out for early finishers. I normally do booklets of 5 images and switch them out after a week. Sometimes I do these in small groups too to work on sentence writing. There are 2 version. The version as seen below, or one without a picture to colour – then students draw a matching picture!
These journals are one of the easiest ways to get my students to write something! The picture cues at the bottom give them confidence about something to write about and how to spell at least 5 words! I usually pair these with the vocabulary word charts from above to give my students even more writing independence. They have to use the writers checklist before they hand it in. This helps students to already start self-editing! This set comes with 20 journal prompts for the whole month!
If your students enjoy Bump games or Roll and Covers, then they’ll love this too! This is the same idea but with letters. Students will flip over a letter card, check to see if it’s on their mat. If so they cover it! The first to cover all their letters wins! These mats come in uppercase, lowercase and a mix of both.
My October centers come with 5 math and 5 literacy centers. The great thing about these, is that they take ALL the thinking out of what to plan for the month! Just print, cut and go! October covers syllables, letters, sightwords, ending sounds and word families! Great for small groups or literacy rotations!
