Favorite Stories: Room on the Broom!

Currently, my favorite Halloween book is Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson! My students always love the whimsical story, lively illustrations and the rhythm of the text almost feels musical when read aloud (There is, in fact, a musical version that can be heard HERE!).

I always read the book a few times, do a little dramatic play with some props and then towards the end of the week I show the short animated movie - the kids really love this story!

Since the story is repetitive, it great for having the children join in while reading and to work on retelling skills afterwards. I really wanted my students to be able to engage with this story over and over again in new and different hands-on ways, so I created a few activities to go with it - they can be found HERE. 

My students' absolute FAVORITE activity is this Build & Balance Retelling activity: 

Students have to balance the broom by carefully stacking the storytelling props on top of each other. I created several printable options including foldable picture props, pictures to attach to wooden blocks (or these BLOCKS), or pictures sized for DUPLO type blocks. Several options make for quick and easy differentiation! 

The foldable stacking pieces are the easiest to balance and the quietest, but are more fragile than the pictures sized for wooden blocks. The Duplo pictures are great for adding to your building area and they stick together so there isn't really much balancing, just building. 

Build it up, but don't knock it down! 

For older students, I added some worksheet options to go with the activities including pages for retelling, creative writing, problem solving, main idea and story elements. There are MANY different options for each, which makes for easy differentiation! 

I also collected these great dramatic play props so that the children can act out the story!

Pumpkin Carving..

Just one more of many posts like this one all over the internet right now... it is, after all, almost Halloween! My son and I picked out this beautiful round orange pumpkin the other day at a roadside stand. There were so many to choose from!

He enjoyed rolling it around the living room and comparing it to a couple of other smaller pumpkins that we had purchased at different times this week. I showed him pictures of Jack-O-Lanterns in a few story books that we had around and we even explored pictures on Google images. Once he finally understood what we were going to do, he got very excited! The other night after dinner, we put out some newspaper and cut that pumpkin open.

He was a little hesitant to pull the top off....

And although he wasn't very keen on putting his hands inside to get the seeds out, he did end up giving it a try. I did have to pull most of them out myself though.

He helped me to decide how to draw the face by naming the parts that we needed: eyes, nose & mouth:

After we drew it, I worked on cutting the pieces out with a knife. He was very interested in the knife... why is it always the most dangerous part that the little ones are interested in? Once we got it cut out, he spend quite some time putting the pieces back in the holes like a puzzle.

Here it is all finished and lit up!

How did pumpkin carving go at your house??