Halloween has got to be every child's favourite holiday! I enjoy the opportunity that it brings to work on early writing skills. Since the beginning of the school year, the students have been labeling pictures. When we talked about apples, we labelled. When we talked about caterpillars and butterflies, we labelled. The reason for this was to help them understand the concrete nature of nouns.
Nouns are the words we use to name a person, place or thing. This week, the students were introduced to adjectives. Adjectives are the words we use to describe a noun.
As we completed a hands-on activity to create a Halloween character (another important word as we work to identify the characters in a story), we then thought of words that we could put in front of each label word (noun), to describe that label (adjective). In this list, the student has written:
screws in neck, green skin, ripped clothes, metal shoes, spiky hair and black hair. The underlined words are the adjectives.
The projects for witches were two-fold. We created a large full body witch and chose different patterns of paper to ensure the witches were colourful. We then just created a sheet focusing on her fancy shoes and striped stockings.
This gave us another opportunity to work on adjectives as seen in this example. To add a challenge, no adjective could be used more than once. On this list the student wrote:
pointy hat, long dress, buckled shoes, magic broom, warty skin and curvy shoes
Today's character was a skeleton. We read a book called "The Skeleton with the Halloween Hiccups" and then the book above which is a combination of fiction and non-fiction. The words in the fiction part of the book are taken from an old Negro spiritual so we tried to sing those words. We watched a wonderful YouTube video that gave us a chance to listen and recall information about the bones in our bodies. The students shared their recollections and then used those shared sentences to write four skeleton facts. I hope if you just push the "play" arrow, it will play on the blog. The students may want to watch it again!
We then listened to directions orally and followed the directions sequence to create our own little rattler!
It gave us all one more chance to create a list of adjectives for a skeleton!
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