Tag:

Halloween

Fall Activities for the Classroom

by Sara Qualls October 14, 2022

written by Sara Qualls

Orange you excited for fall? If you’re not, I hope these activities will spark some ideas and fun for your classroom. And if you’ve got little ones or furry friends and will be out trick or treating this year, be sure to check out A Great Trick-Or-Treating App to learn how to plan ahead and make the most of all the candy loot in your neighborhood.

Seven Spooktacular Activities for the Elementary Classroom. Fill your elementary classroom with tons of fun! These ideas range from dress-up days and an adjective challenge to activities your students can try at home.

*Halloween Adjective Challenge from the “Seven Spooktacular Activities” TechNotes Article*

Free Halloween Posters and a Spooky STEM Lesson. Here you’ll find a smorgasbord of free Halloween-themed posters for you. Plus, they’ve also included a spider activity to bring STEM to your classroom.

The Dump Truck Incident: An Elementary Problem-Solving Challenge. This popular challenge is also known as the Pumpkin Push. It’s a great way to get your students excited and thinking about engineering concepts in a new way.

Halloween Scratch Lesson. Are you teaching your students how to code with Scratch? This is a wonderful project for creating their own game. CreateCodeLoad has done a great job of breaking down each step.

Spooky Breakouts and Games. Our own Peggy Reimers gives you the lowdown on breakouts, challenges, trivia, and more games that are sure to make your October spooktacular.

Transform Your Classroom Into a Fall Festival with These Five ESL Activities. You can find exciting activities that will range from beginners to advanced students for those learning English. Create a hands-on experience with the tastes of autumn, creating leaf beings, and more.

Build a Jack-O-Lantern with Google Slides. This classic activity from Eric Curts is a great one for letting students be creative while working on their writing and tech skills.

Halloween Writing Prompts. Get your students excited about writing with a plethora of writing prompts for the Halloween season.

Halloween Speech Therapy Activity: Mad Libs! This activity targets various parts of speech. Your students will be smiling at the end as they read their silly story.

Fall in ELA: 20 Ideas for Reading and Writing in Autumn. If you are at a loss for what to have your students write about next, check out this post that has a plethora of prompts and supporting activities that are sure to get everyone excited about the season.

Four Fun and Easy Halloween Activities for Middle School ELA. These engaging activities are geared toward middle school students. You’ll find a read-aloud, scary sentence starters, and more.

October is a great time to get into the fall spirit or for all things Halloween. I hope you find one of these activities thrilling for your classroom.

October 14, 2022 1 comment

7 Spooktacular Activities for the Elementary Classroom

Announcements/Important Dates

Seven Spooktacular Activities for the Elementary Classroom

by Peggy Reimers October 14, 2021

written by Peggy Reimers

Autumn is my favorite season of the year. Why? My top reason– the heat of the Texas summer is behind us (hopefully). Coming in at a close second is decorating cookies with the TCEA staff and their families. It is such a delight to hunt for Halloween sprinkles and decorating supplies for this fun activity. Of course, the third reason I love fall is because I get to find and create activities for students and teachers!

Are you ready to get your spooky-ooky on? Carve out some time for fun in your classroom with these seven fa-boo-lous activities for 2021!

Difficult Dictionary Dress-Up Day

Mr. Donnie Piercey is a teacher in Lexington, Kentucky. I love that he has his fifth-graders dress up around Halloween as a difficult dictionary word. Can you match the words below to students in the photo?

Incognito
Zegal
Disheveled
Memorandum
Fortuitous
Lethargic
Lackadaisical
Brawny
Sagacious

Check out Donnie’’s Dictionary Day parent letter here for the details and some tips on how to put an educational twist on Halloween costumes. Also, you should follow him on Twitter! He’s the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and he is always tweeting good stuff.

Halloween Adjective Challenge

Since last year’s Halloween Synonym Challenge was a success, this year I have added the Halloween Adjective Challenge. This Google Form has ten images. Your challenge is to read the three sentences and choose the sentence that has correct adjectives for each image. The challenge has been created as a Google Form quiz, so look for your score and answers after submitting. Try it out here.

Halloween Synonym Challenge

Last year, the Halloween Synonym Challenge was released. To be honest, I forgot I had even created this challenge. Imagine my surprise when I opened up the results spreadsheet while writing this blog and there were 1,000+ entries! One of the best things about teaching is that there’s always an opportunity to make things better. So I changed the original Halloween Synonym Challenge into two separate challenges because I thought a 20-synonym activity was a bit long for one sitting.

The redesigned Synonym Challenge is housed in a Google Form that is set up as a quiz. So look for your score and answers after submitting.

Easier Words

More Challenging Vocabulary

Trick-or-Treat Scratch Game

If you are a Scratch user and want your students to code a Halloween Scratch game, I found just the activity for you. Find the how-to blog here. Maytal’s blog includes the lesson plan, an introduction video, and a four-step video series on creating the Scratch game.

The Halloween Scratch Lesson videos include:

Step 1: Drop One Candy!

Step 2: Clone Those Candies!

Step 3: Handle Those Clones!

Step 4: Add Score!

This is a fantastic Scratch activity because it can be used to introduce the concept of variables while still keeping things simple. Use this link to request the Starter Project.

Digital Breakouts

Also, I have two digital breakouts for Halloween. Won’t you join the 4,678 students and teachers who have solved The Boo Breakout? And if you are up for more, check out The Trick or Treat Breakout. This breakout was just created last year, but it already has 600 finishers. Will you become one?

If you are new to digital breakouts, read more about them here. The American Library Association has also written a comprehensive article explaining all the details of digital breakouts. The article also lists many places to find breakouts you can use throughout the year.

And remember educators, if you need the answers to The Boo Breakout, The Trick or Treat Breakout, or others – email me at preimers@tcea.org. Please include your school information in the signature line.

Fun for Home

Teachers, if you are looking for a variety of ideas for your own little ones, Country Living has the 43 Best Halloween Activities that Are Wicked Fun: “To-dos for the whole family that are downright spooktacular.” From looking at these, I am definitely liking the creepy-crawly hairdo, and I think I am going to make myself the candy corn party hat. The “DIY Your Kids’ Halloween costumes” are a must to scroll through. So creative!

More Ways to Get Your Pumpkin On!

If you are looking for more ideas, check out these previous blog posts packed with plenty of pumpkiny goodness:

Go out there and be the ghosties with the mosties. Eat, drink, and be scary! And just make sure you have a happy and safe Halloween.

Featured image: Designed by TCEA staff.

October 14, 2021 5 comments

Online Tools and Apps

Spooky Breakouts and Games

by Peggy Reimers October 16, 2020

written by Peggy Reimers

Some educators dread Halloween. The consequences of a late night mixed with a sugar crash make for quite a day in the classroom. You just never know what you’re going to walk into that day!

But I know from personal experience, we as educators will make the best of any situation. So dust off the cobwebs, break out the candy corn and let’s get our BOO on with some activities and breakouts for you and your students. Most can be played in your classroom with social distancing or adapted virtually. And teachers, if your own Halloween party is going virtual, many of these will work for family and adult fun.

Digital Breakouts

Tricker or Treat Header with Are you dreaming about your full trick or treat bag with all the goodies? You have 45 minutes, to solve the Trick or Treat Breakout and then you can dive into all your sweets and treats! Ready Set Boo! — Screenshot by author.

Try out my brand-spanking-new Halloween digital breakout, The Trick or Treat Breakout. Don’t forget you can always email me for the digital lock answers or any activity answers at preimers@tcea.org. If you are new to digital breakouts, read the getting-started information on a previous blog.

You almost might want to try out my original Halloween Breakout, The Boo Breakout. Since September 2017, more than 3,600 students and teachers have solved this breakout.

Would You Rather?

At a TCEA staff meeting, our Executive Director opened with a Would You Rather team building activity. We each had our own WYR statement. We announced our pick and followed up with the reason(s) why for the selection. It was a lot of fun to learn about my colleague’s choices, so I turned this idea into a Halloween-themed event. You can view the slide deck here or get your own copy of the game here.

Halloween Charades

I can definitely see charades working on a virtual platform. You could even shout things out while pantomiming because your microphone would be muted. I think this might help my acting abilities. My Halloween charades game contains 36 words or phrases to guess, along with a section of Double Trouble words (just in case you need a challenge.)

Make a copy here.

Halloween-Inspired Synonyms Challenge

Halloween Synonyms Google Form. — Screenshot by author.

When teaching writing to my fourth graders, we talked about overused words like “pretty,” “run,” “eat,” and “walk” that can be spiffed up. I still remember pinning word wheels to my classroom ceiling (back in the pre-Google years!) so my students had access to synonyms. But oh what a pain to take them all down for the standardized writing test.

Check out a Halloween Synonyms Challenge to boost your spooky letter combinations (just another way to say “words”). This could easily be incorporated in an upper elementary or middle school language arts class.

Oldies But Goodies – Guessing and Trivia

I wanted to share a couple more activities I played back in the day with my elementary students. The first, Name That Costume, is where I read out loud a list of clothing articles and props to my class. My students had pen and paper to guess the costumes. Another game we played was a Halloween Trivia Challenge. This has a little bit of a twist to your typical trivia challenge. In my opinion, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to answer trivia questions if you have no clue – very discouraging. Instead, I gave each student a multiple choice answer sheet with four options with the occasional silly answer blended in for some humor. Make a copy here.

Create the Right Ambience

The Novel Effect app is available in the iOS App store or Google Play. The app contains music and sounds for tons of children’s books and poems. According to the email I just received, Novel Effect is announcing, “FAB-BOO-LOUS New Releases) when it comes to the creepy and the crawly literature. Check out their website.

Want to add music to an activity, silent reading or writing time, or while taking on breakouts? Ambient Mixer is the place to get 57,000 free sound track mixes. If you are a Harry Potter fan, here is the mixer list for you. Check out Lori Gracey’s blog “The Perfect Music to Read By” for more details.

May you all have a safe and happy Halloween. And as always, if you have questions or need answers, please email me at preimers@tcea.org.

Image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay

More Digital Breakouts

Featured Image created by author in Google Slides.

October 16, 2020 8 comments

Coding/Computer Science Content Areas Digital Literacy Educational Trends Good Teaching

Tips, Tricks, and Tech Tidbits: Fire Safety, Halloween, Hybrid Learning, and More

by Lori Gracey October 7, 2020

written by Lori Gracey

I’ve discovered some really cool tech tools and tips to share with you this week, including a couple of must-see ones for fall. So let’s dive right in.

Fire Safety and Prevention Resources

This site offers lots of fun resources for elementary students about Fire Prevention Week (October 4-10, 2020) and fire safety. It includes two different ebooks, choice boards, videos, and more.

Halloween Scratch Lesson: Spooky Clones

This cute lesson plan for upper elementary to middle school students includes an opening video for engagement and then four lessons to help students create a “scary” game. Note: You must request the lessons via email from the creator (form included in the website).

Six Requirements for Successful Hybrid Learning

Mark Anderson, the ICTEvengelist, shared what has to be in place in order for hybrid teaching and learning to be successful. If any one of the eight items below are missing, then failure may result. How are you making sure to provide all of these if you or your teachers are leading hybrid teaching?

tips

Noise Canceling App

If you need to record a video for your students or staff to watch, but find that the noise in your classroom or at home is interfering, then check out Krisp. The app is available for Macintosh and Windows computers and will mute both microphone noise and background noise for 120 minutes/week for free. There are examples of how good the app is on the website that let you hear what it sounds like with and without muting. It works on 800+ communication programs including Zoom, Teams, and Meet.

Weekly Tech Tips

K-2 technology integration specialist Traci Plitz provides a fabulous weekly tip sheet for her teachers. You can scroll through them and see the past weeks, as well as the current one. While they are designed for use in primary classrooms, many of them can be applied K-12.

Have Your Students Publish to the World

The Global Writing Project is a free weekly writing experience for all ages, a place where learners can write about the world with the world. With a weekly prompt, students can submit their writing via Flipgrid, Buncee, or Wakelet and be provided with an authentic global audience and an opportunity to be showcased as part of their weekly “Global Write” Champions Corner.

Release Your Inner Artist

I admit to being old enough to remember fondly the hours I spent creating with the Spirograph, a fabulous drawing tool for those of us who can’t draw. Now there’s a free, online version available called Inspirograph. Since you’re using your mouse instead of a pen or pencil, it’s a little bit harder to maneuver. But it’s still tons of fun and very relaxing in these stress-filled days.

A New Tech Tool to Improve Your Virtual Self

David Jakes shares his new favorite tech tool, mmhmm. “This is a tool that provides a series of new options to improve your virtual presence – in my case Zoom (it also works with Google Meet, and Chrome or Firefox only). The basic idea of mmhmm is that it provides a virtual camera interface for Zoom that gives you some interesting new features.” The tool is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation here.

Student Avatars

TCEA’s own Lisa Monthie offers this cool tidbit that she picked up from Tammy G. Neil (both are great educators to follow on Twitter!). Have the students create an avatar with https://avatarmaker.com/ and “then use a tool such as https://gifmaker.me/ to make a GIF of all the students.”

Halloween Videos for Elementary Students

Celebrate each day of October leading up to Halloween with a different video. This article provides 31 cute and learning-filled shorts for younger students.

Getting Your Students Moving

We know that movement is crucial for learning, and here’s a fun way to put it into practice. Spin It is a random movement and exercise generator. At its default, it includes some very tough exercises like planks and wall sits. But the really cool thing about the spinner is that you can customize it for your students to be much simpler and less exhausting. Put in silly things like hopping five times on one foot or rubbing your stomach and your head at the same time. Mix it up, get students moving, and get them laughing!

That’s all of the tidbits for this time. If you missed any of the previous tips, you can find them all by searching our blog for “tips, tricks, and tech tidbits.” Let me know if any of today’s or earlier tips helped you.

October 7, 2020 0 comments

Android iOS Tips and Tricks

A Great Trick-or-Treating App

by Lori Gracey October 20, 2018

written by Lori Gracey

The holiday celebration of Halloween hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years. But now there is a new twist that can make the celebration even better. Check out the Nextdoor app. Normally used for neighborhood events, the app has added. a Treat Map.

Where’s the Candy?

Simply sign up for the free service. Then you can go in to the provided map of your neighborhood. You will be given the choice to add icons over your family’s home specifically for Halloween. There’s a candy corn you can use if you are giving out candy or a haunted house icon if you’re hosting a scary adventure and everyone is welcome to take part.

Nextdoor

Planning the Night Out

Parents can use the Treat Map, available also for iPhone and Android, to help their children plan out where they will go to trick-or-treat. There’s no need for confusion about who is providing candy and who isn’t with the old habit of leaving an outside light on. They can also use it to see what streets are offering the most candy. Teachers could use the website version of the app to have students plan out the best route to get get the most candy or the route that doesn’t require any backtracking or lost time. For Halloween, Nextdoor is a good thing! Plus, they’ve given everyone the ability to add pet treats this year.

October 20, 2018 1 comment

Good Teaching

Fall into Elementary Autumn Resources

by Peggy Reimers October 2, 2017

written by Peggy Reimers

How do you know autumn is upon Texas?

The temp drops below ninety.

Football season is in full swing.

School zones are blinking with lights.

My favorite holiday is near

Bats, ghosties and pumpkins, oh dear.

Signs are out for pumpkin spice

And TCEA rolls out some fall resources that are ohhhh, so nice.

I am an elementary teacher at heart and always will be. One of the things I miss about teaching is designing fun activities for my kiddoes. I hope you and your students enjoy the following activities. By all means, share these resources with your fellow teachers.

The Boo Breakout

The Boo Breakout is a Halloween-themed breakout with five digital locks. You can find all the answers in the hidden links from the breakout site. I did not include any external links to eliminate annoying ads or possible inappropriate content. Fourth graders and up should be able to solve The Boo Breakout. Don’t forget that you can always email me for hints if you get stuck on the puzzles.

Little Monster Sorting

A big shout out to Eric Curts and his Control Alt Achieve blog sorting activity, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” for being my inspiration for this next activity. Last spring, Eric designed a graphic organizer to sort fish based on their characteristics. I was inspired to create my own sorting activity with Venn Diagrams. My design is centered around little monsters. Make a copy here.

Autumn Pixel Art

Another one of my favorites from Eric is his Pixel Art. Designing ghosts, pumpkins, and fall leaves can easily be created in this medium. Check out his directions and templates.

Leaves FALL Down Digital Breakout

Fall Leaf Graph in Tanya Coffey's breakout.

Tonya Coffey just released her newest digital breakout, Leaves FALL Down. Currently, Tonya has eight holiday and three seasonal digital breakouts for elementary students. She has designed four teacher breakouts as well. Tonya creates digital breakouts for the second to fifth graders at her school. When asked about grades levels, she comments, “Depending on the level, additional support will need to be given. If you want students to work independently, I would say fifth grade.”

Stop Motion Autumn Animation

Try this easy-peasy stop animation with Google Slides for your little ones. Check out my example.

Steps to the Stop Motion Animation Jack O’Lantern

Open up a new Google Slide presentation
Draw and decorate a large Jack O’Lantern
- I used the polygon tool and connected the ends. If you connect the ends, you can use the fill bucket.
Duplicate the slide.
Change the color of the eyes, nose, and mouth.
Publish your Google Slides presentation to the web.
- Under File: choose Publish to the Web
- Under Auto-advance slides: choose every second
- Select: Start slideshow as soon as the player loads
- Select: Restart the slideshow after the last slide
Copy and share the link.

Pumpkin Building

Check out this worldwide collaboration project. I designed a Google Slides presentation for students to turn a pumpkin into a jack o’lantern. This project can double as a digital citizenship lesson. The collaboration of artwork reinforces the concept of respecting each others work. You can build on my slide deck which is Shareable with the World or you can Make your own Copy to Use in Your Classroom.

For even more (and I mean PLENTY MORE) autumn resources, check out this blog post. Happy fall, y’all!

Featured image and activity screenshots by author.

October 2, 2017 0 comments

Good Teaching

Fall Websites for You and Your Students

by Lori Gracey October 20, 2016

written by Lori Gracey

This blog was updated on October 27 with additional resources.

I think that most of us really love this time of year: autumn with its wonderful colors and temperatures below 90. There’s Friday night football and homecoming parades, the students are into the routine of school, and everything has pumpkin added to it. Then there are the holidays, like Halloween and Thanksgiving. To help get you in the mood, below are some fun tech resources to use in the classroom for this amazing time of year.

Fall

Students can practice their basic math skills in Tackle Math Ball.
In Apple Surprise, primary kids can practice counting and color recognition as they pick and catch apples.
Using Google Earth and any weather site, have students predict when leaves will begin to change color where they live.

Halloween

To keep the learning going in October, check out the many interactive, educational sites (mainly for elementary students) available here.
This pumpkin carving website is always a favorite with students. Or you can try this one. Both contain ads.
Let your students read some scary ghost stories and tales of the supernatural.
Or have the stories read to you on this site of regional ghost stories.
Ben and Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard will certainly inspire your students to create their own tombstones of “dead” homework assignments, bad habits, disgusting dinners, and more.
PBS Kids has a fantastic Halloween website for younger students, with lots of games and activities.
For older students, introduce them to a scary old time radio show. You can try a science fiction story from Dimension X or Frankenstein or The Inner Sanctum. You could then ask the class to create their own radio show.
Find the missing numbers when counting by fives in this Spooky Sequences activity.
In Ghost Blasters, students must blast a ghost that matches the math requirement.
This is a great Google Drawings activity that can be used for any time of year. Have your students create Halloween Magnetic Poetry using the provided template.
This fun site, Zombie-Based Learning, has a wealth of resources that focus on geography, virus transmission, literary connections, writing, and more.
And thanks to Richard Byrne for the idea of having students use Padlet to collaboratively create safety tips for trick-or-treating or share their best secrets for collecting the most candy.
Halloween Writing is a fun hyper-doc providing lots of creative writing prompts for students. Have them File — Make a Copy — Edit for them.
If you work with elementary students, be sure to check out these seven fun Halloween activities.
For those students who enjoy programming with Scratch, here are some great ideas for a Spooky Scratch-oween.

Thanksgiving

This site from the Plimoth Plantation is a wonderful addition to the social studies classroom. It is an interactive and accurate activity where students become detectives to discover what really happened at the first Thanksgiving.
Learn about the first Thanksgiving with this well done site from Scholastic.
Younger students can read a story about a silly turkey and learn to follow directions in this website with audio from Starfall.
Learn more about the early Pilgrims in the Jamestown Online Adventure.
In this lesson, students craft acrostic poems using words like gratitude. You can use a tool like WorksheetGenius to quickly create acrostics. Here is the lesson plan for this activity.
Encourage your students to learn to Talk Like a Pilgrim or to include some of these old phrases in their writing.
Have your students create an infographic on the holiday. And additional Thanksgiving by the Numbers facts are also available.
Older students should read and discuss the proclamation creating the first Thanksgiving and then create their own proclamation about what Americans should be thankful for today.
Listen to the Ives Holiday Symphony as it is discussed. The Thanksgiving section begins at 41:30 and lasts approximately 15 minutes. Then have students write about what they heard.
Have students conduct a classroom poll to determine everyone’s favorite Thanksgiving dessert. Then let them listen to NPR’s Pass the Dessert: America’s Thanksgiving Recipes show where favorites from days gone by are discussed, made, and tasted. The recipes are included.

While your students should definitely try some of these online activities, make sure they also get outside during this fabulous weather and enjoy what autumn has for us!

October 20, 2016 0 comments

Online Tools and Apps

Tech and Treat: A Free, Fun-Filled Webinar for Everyone!

by Chance McKee October 8, 2015

written by Chance McKee

The bewitching hour is here at last

And we’ve planned an event sure to be a blast!

From witches to warlocks, goblins to ghosts,

Join TCEA as your spooktacular host!

The staff are dressed up and wanting to teach

Fun resources to use that will earn you a screech!

October 22nd – what are you doing, I ask?

How about teaching and learning and wearing a mask?

Creep and crawl on over, monsters and ghouls,

And learn from TCEA about some wonderful tools.

Just trust when we say this won’t be a fright.

You’ll learn all the tricks to do your Halloween right.

4-5 pm Central, it’ll be a treat, oh my!

Just keep an eye out for bats and broomsticks that fly.

We hope to see you there, costumes and all.

This will be a treat for one and for all.

Join TCEA on October 22, 2015 from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Central for a fun, free-to-anyone webinar as we show you wonderful tech ways to get your students into the spirit for Halloween.

October 8, 2015 0 comments

Announcements/Important Dates

What’s Scarier: Zombies or Roller Coasters?

by Kristy Breaux October 5, 2015

written by Kristy Breaux

This October, experience Fright Fest at Six Flags Fiesta Texas with a discount for being a TCEA member. This amazing event features terrifying Halloween-themed attractions, live musical shows, horrific haunted houses, and scream-worthy scare zones. You can enjoy your favorite roller coasters after dark, which is a whole different experience.

Each day until 5:00 p.m., the park offers family-friendly Thrills by Day, where nothing seems out of the ordinary besides a few spooky decorations. You and the little ones can take in a nice show in the safety of sunlight or visit the Looney Tunes Twick or Tweat Twail. All of your favorite family and thrill rides will be available for the traditional Six Flags’ experience. But beware! Once the clock strikes 5:00 p.m., the ghouls come out and the haunting Fright by Night begins!

TCEA members receive discounted rates at theme parks, theatrical productions, and more throughout the year. Log in here and explore the discounted fun in your horizon.

October 5, 2015 0 comments