Planning Your Class Halloween Party

 

Planning Fall/Halloween Parties

Planning your Fall/Halloween party is a great way to have a successful fun time!

Organize the Party

Decide on a time that your party will start. You know that parents will want to be present. Tell them the time the party begins so they know exactly when to be there. Post a sign outside your door so that they know what time they can come into your classroom.

                 

  

Involve the Parents

Ask the parents for help. It is amazing what they will do to help. They can help prepare materials for that day, printing, copying, cutting, etc. You can also ask them to bring certain snacks.

                                           

Since parents will be at the party, put them to work. Start your party by having a parent read a fall or Halloween-themed book to the kids. Decide if you want the kids to listen to the story from their desks/tables or on the carpet near the reader.

Fall-Halloween Themed Activities

Plan some fun Fall-Halloween-themed activities for the kids to do at their tables/desks that parents can do with them. A parent can pass out the activities. For a great resource with some fun activities take a look at Halloween Activity Pack, by Happy Hive Homeschooling!

Have a place where the goodies can be sorted into bags or plates. You can use grocery bags or store-bought bags. Ask some parents to do the goodie sorting and other parents to pass them out to the students.

Create a Party Timeline

To have things move smoothly have a timeline. When it’s time to transition to the next activity you can keep things moving by announcing the next activity.

2:30-2:35 Welcome Parents into the classroom and direct them where to go.

2:35-2:42 Storytime-Have students go to the carpet while parents stay at the tables, for the story. This time frame includes the transition to and from the desks and carpet.

2:42-3:00 Fall-Halloween themed activities

3:00-3-20 Pass out and partake of the goodies

3:20 Thank the Parents and ask them to wait outside for their children. Clean up, throw away, and pass out leftover goodies to the kids that brought them.

3:28 Line up and do a Fall-Halloween chant while waiting for the school bell to ring.

If you want any DIY Halloween Party Ideas for the Classroom, here are some great ideas!

If you would like to receive classroom freebies, you can sign up to receive the Froggy Newsletter. I send out 2-3 newsletters a month with a variety of freebies. This month, subscribed teachers received editable Halloween Party letters and Halloween Party signs. I hope you sign up!

May you and your kids have a fun and well-organized Fall-Halloween Party!

Debbie - Froggy About Teaching

Halloween Themed Writing Picture Prompts

 

Halloween Writing Picture Prompts

Don’t you just love the festive “fun-ness” of Halloween? Your kids get to dress up. It is as much fun helping your kids decide how to dress up as it is for them to get dressed up.

What an engaging way to get your students writing using the Halloween theme! We know what fun it can be! The kids know what fun it can be! But we tend to guilt ourselves as teachers. We want to use resources with a serious theme because they will learn it that way. But we also want to engage them in what they are learning. Using holiday-themed resources can be a fun, surprising, and appealing way to get them to learn or practice what they have learned.

This teaching resource, Halloween Writing Picture Prompts will do just that. This resource is geared toward Kindergarten and First-grade students, and young writers. We know that our students come to us at the beginning of the school year with different abilities to write. Some kids will be emergent writers while others will be a little more experienced or more comfortable with the writing process. This writing product has been differentiated to address those very issues.

There are several parts to this resource. I will break it down for you.

Oral Sentence Starters

Some of our young students come to us with a limited language or speak in common phrases. Regardless of this, all our students need to be exposed to a more formal academic language. 

So, I provided Oral Sentence Starters to introduce each writing page. Each one will begin with a focus, then the sentence starter will be said out loud or written on the board. Students will complete that oral sentence starter with a partner or table mates. Then some of the students can share their complete sentences out loud (if students need help saying the sentence correctly, that would be the time to do it) and be a model for the other students. Then all of them would be hearing different responses to the same sentence starter.

 

Differentiated

There are seven writing prompts. Each prompt has been created in three versions to differentiate for the different abilities of your students, emergent writers, transitional writers, and fluent writers.

 

Emergent Writers

These young writers are students who are at the very basics of writing. They may be drawing pictures, random letters, and numbers for words or sentences, and still not have the concept of a sentence.

Version A for Emergent Writers

This version provides lots of support for these students with traceable sentence stems and where they can complete the sentences.

Transitional Writers

These young writers are a little further along in their understanding of what a word and a sentence are. They may be attempting to sound out words and attempting to write groups of words as sentences.

Version B for Transitional Writers

This version provides some support with the traceable sentence starters which have limited words and fewer of them-sentence starters.

 

Fluent Writers

These students are where you want your students to be. They understand what a sentence is. They are writing a mix of both words they are sounding out and words they now know how to spell, including the use of sight words.

Version C for Fluent Writers

Students who are ready for this version are ready to label the pictures on their own, to respond to the prompt with their own words and sentences.

Halloween Pictures

The Halloween pictures that have been included as a part of this writing set are not the scary kind but the common fun side of Halloween. It’s for the kids to enjoy and just have fun doing an activity that can be challenging for these young writers.

You can find this resource on Amped Up Learning and Teachers Pay Teachers.

Have a happy October with your students and enjoy the festive, cooler time this month brings to us.

Debbie – Froggy About Teaching