Is it just me, or did October FLY by? I can not believe that it is going to be November when we go back to school next week. Eek! In the midst of all the Halloween excitement we managed to squeeze in some fun activities. These are my top 5 favourite activities that we did this month. Plus what we are giving our students this year since food treats are not allowed.
We follow the Jolly Phonics order for teaching letters and sounds in our classroom. These dice games were a huge hit with our students. We put them out in 2 ways. One was individual stations where students played on their own with the goal of covering all the letters, and we also put it out a table for 4 to take turns and try to race to see who could cover all of their letters first. They would roll the die and if they had the matching letter they would say it and cover it. We got some great assessments out of it!
Potion Mixing
Mixing potions had to be a highlight of the month. Students were SO excited to create a potion and see what the potion did. This took a bit of prep work. We purchased all the items needed at our local dollar store, then we put them into containers with little labels and set out the potion cards and let the kids go wild! This was great for 1-1 counting. If you don’t have the ingredients in real form you could easily use craft materials like pompoms, pipecleaners, etc. Just use the cute labels to label your jars!
Portable Word Walls and Write the Room
We think it’s super important to make writing words as accessible to students as possible. We are fortunate that our kids seem to love making words! We use portable word walls. We have them set up in a variety of ways. We keep vocabulary charts at our writing center that have 20 words on them. Students can use these photo prompts to help their writing. We also keep our word walls in a word wall chart for them to take 1 word at a time, and we keep the same word wall cards on a ring so that they can carry the whole word wall to wherever they need it. Some students took the fall word wall over to the magnet tiles and created words!
We also introduced Write the Room this month and it was a HUGE hit. They treated it like a scavenger hunt and were helping each other to find words. We had to create a list of who wanted to go next since we ran out of clipboards and Expo markers!
Dice Games
With so much excitement around our letter recognition game we decided to pull out some Roll and Covers and Roll and Race games. Students played against each other in the same style as our letter games. They rolled and if they had the number they said it and covered it. Lots of fun, super easy to prep! Some mats had numbers for just 1 die and some had numbers for 2 dice, so we could meet students at their levels.
Fine Motor Hole Punching
I don’t know about your students, but ours NEED fine motor practice desperately. We put out these fall and Halloween themed cards for students to hole punch, and boy was it a hit! We planned to have students cut the cards out themselves, but they are not there yet. Hopefully with our Christmas set they will be able to do that!
Our Halloween gift to our kiddos was super cheap and super cute. My favourite combination. We grabbed 2 packs of fangs from the Dollar store and put them into a little baggie with a cute tag that says “I think you’re FANG-tastic”. We hope the kids love them!
