Sigh...so...I don't want to promote the pagan holiday...but I REALLY want to take a week off, and this week seems like a fine one to do it. I want to spend the week just doing fun, halloweeny, fall stuff. Any suggestions? I was saving pumpkins to do on monday so we'll have THAT at least to keep us busy...any fun ideas ladies?!?!
I like taking my son on walks and gathering fallen leaves, pine cones, flowers, etc. Then we make art projects with them, or I make dry arrangements with potpouri and place them around the house. Also, when we find interesting things, we try to look them up on the internet and learn about what kind of tree they came from, etc. Its also a good time to look for cool bugs, lol.
Lots of things here http://www.dltk-holidays.com/halloween/index.html Also maybe reading a good spooky story like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and then if you are game seeing the movie. Here are some stories: http://www.apples4theteacher.com/holidays/halloween/kids-short-stories/index.html
When I was a classroom teacher, you really have to do some kind of "halloweeny" topics. I would always teach on skeletons. That way, we had skeletons hanging around the room (which was halloweeny), but we were learning about how our bones allowed our bodies to move, protect our organs, gives us support, etc. I also got a tape from the library called "Fright Night: Music that goes bump in the night". It had "scary" classical music. "La Danse Macabre", "Night on Bald Mountain", "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"....things like that. We would talk about the musical patterns of the pieces.
Yeah, you could talk about Birthdays, since so many ladies on here have October Birthdays! I like taking a walk and collecting different leaves, then putting paper over them and coloring over them in different crayon colors so the shape of the leaf shows up on the paper. I have a recipe for making pumpkin pie from a pumpkin to pie! That'd be an all day type thing. You can roast the seeds too! You can feel proud that you really made something all the way from scratch!
do pumpkin seeds, and watch movies, Charlie Brown Halloween is on Tuesday night CBS at 7 central time. You can do picking up pine cones putting peanut butter on them then roll them in bird seeds hang them on trees and watch all the birds come to eat off of that. take a nice long walk in the woods just to have a good time.
one of my fave halloween activities as a child was when our school would do this "creepy witches cave" ... what they did was have a room all set up and a 'guide' to take you through, blindfolded, and have you touch things as they told a story ----- i forget how the story went, but the stuff you touched matched up to various things, like this: brains = cold cooked spagetti eyeballs = peeled grapes fingers = i think they were some type of doughy thing there was a bunch more, but it was long ago and those are the ones i remembered -- especially the eyeball one because that was SO GROSS when put with the story :lol: ********** there's a haunted mansion thing set up in a community close to mine, and while dd(10) and i have been there when it was just the normal thing (it's open all summer as a tourist thing, it also has a water garden), right now it's done up even scarier, with real people running around in creepy costumes to scare you, not just the animations and stuff, and she won't come out to that one with me, so i'm trying to talk a friend of mine into coming out there late tonight.... she hasn't agreed yet, but i'm working on it. :lol:
Along the idea Deena had with leaves - take two sheets of waxed paper, crayon shavings and leaves and place the leaves and crayon shavings between the two sheets of paper. Iron the paper and the crayon will melt to give it an almost stained glass effect. Depending on how strict your state is, it sounds like you can still get some "school" in if you use some of these ideas. So far I see music, p.e . (walk), art, science!
Actually if you look at the history of Halloween you will find that the modern associations of death are based in Catholicism. All Soul's Day and All Saint's Week It is a time of year to remember and celebrate your ancestors. "Pagan" celebrations have to do with the end of the Celtic calendar year and the end of harvest season. It is essentially New Year's Eve.
Jackie, they are splendid ideas. I wish I was set up to do all that, because it would satisfy poor, Halloween deprived Jeannie, lol.
We are taking the week off. We just got back from camping and we have like ten things to do everyday this week. We leave again on Friday for the weekend to visit my parents and go to a wedding. So no time for school this week. We have been studying bats a bit, learned about the origins on Halloween, read the story of the real Prince Dracula and have three Halloween parties to attend all before having our own family fun night on Wednesday. We are going to order pizza, trick or treat, come back and play games (mummy wrap, apple bobbing), do crafts, tell scary stories, watch scary movies, eat our weight in candy and camp out in the living room!!! Oh we also have been reading creepy things. I have been reading out loud The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Samantha has been doing sketches of people from the story. We also are reading lots of Edgar Allan Poe - favorites of mine like Black Cat, Tell Tale Heart, Mask of the Red Death and we have many more. So even though we are not doing "school" this week my kids are always learning!!
A unit on bats!!! Now, I never thought of that! Sounds like something else I might have done that is Halloween-related, but not! Great idea!!!
When I taught in a PS we did a compare & contrast between bats & birds. Jackie... I know teachers that used Dem Bones songs & bought the candies to do with the song!!! Couldn't you also talk about superstitions... You know how sports people are, how you don't let a black cat cross your path. Isn't Halloween a belief, kinda like a superstition.
Stellaluna would be a good book for younger kids about bats. It is about a bat that gets taken in by birds and it starts to act like one until it finds other bats again. Then at the back it has all kinds of facts about bats.
That's what we used to get our brainstorming going!!! The Runaway Pumpkin is a very cute book if you haven't read it!!! It shows you different ways people use pumpkins to make things.
