Yikes! Talk about a blogging break! I am so impressed with the regular updates my favorite bloggers do. I am going to try to improve, I promise 🙂
Although it’s a couple days late, I HAVE to share about our Halloween celebration in first grade last week. At our school, we do not technically “celebrate” Halloween. Instead, our school has a book character dress-up parade. This year, I went as Lilly from Kevin Henkes’s book “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse.” Kevin Henkes is our author of the month every September, so the kids were thrilled to see a familiar face Thursday morning–whiskers and all 🙂 Here is a shot of my snazzy red boots.
Okay, so snazzy isn’t the word. I promise they were more fancy-looking before all of the paint started to peel off! I love easy thrift store costumes 🙂
Because we are not allowed to have a “party,” it is always a challenge to celebrate Halloween while still keeping the peace and remaining *somewhat* educational. This year was a TOTAL success, thanks to a great find on Teachers Pay Teachers. Meet…
Witches’ Brew!
This concoction is courtesy of Rachelle Smith. Visit her TPT store and this item here. It is a glorious freebie that includes all sorts resources to go along with the brew. To begin, we read the poem together as a class first. They LOVED it. I created a more pictoral version of it for my kiddos who cannot read it as is:
Then, I showed the students the ready-made bags of ingredients for our brew. I used brown paper bags and the labels Rachelle includes in her freebie. I am happy to say all of the bags survived and I can even reuse them next year since the ingredients spent such little time in them! Well, except for the Fritos–greasy little things. We read the poem together once more, this time adding the ingredients to the plastic cauldron (5 bucks at Walmart!) as they were mentioned in the poem.
Finally, 13 ingredients later, our concoction was ready to eat! That was our favorite part. Throughout the day, we completed the other papers included in this freebie. We graphed our favorite ingredient, wrote about our most and least favorite ingredient, wrote recommendations for brew, and so on! I can’t stress enough how fun this little activity was.
One of the ONLY drawbacks is the amount of ingredients it requires, however, there is a super easy solution–I used Sign-Up Genius to create a list of ingredients and, within hours, my awesome families had offered to send in all of the ingredients. Easy peasy!
And if you are STILL needing any convincing, you can just take this little witch’s word for it–the clean bowl speaks for itself!
How did you celebrate Halloween in your classroom? I love hearing new ideas. It is such a fun and kid-friendly holiday and SO many possibilities!
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