We decided to call them our Halloween Fun Stations! One of my little sweetie pies said, "We should call them Halloween Fun Stations, because we're learning and having fun! This is building our stamina like crazy." It's one of the craziest days of the year and I get cute little comments like this.
We had 10 stations that the students all rotated to and from. Most of the ideas I borrowed from all the blogs I stalk, but some are my own and I will gradly share everything that I made!
Station #1: Odd/Even Candy Bags
I got this activity FREE from The Bubbly Blonde Teacher. My first graders are constantly having trouble remembering how to tell odd numbers from even numbers and this was great practice and they got to use "candy!" We put out candy in our odd and even candy bags and then filled out a response form for all the numbers we found!
The response sheet we used is at the end of the free packet!
Station #2: Eyeball Shaker
This was a favorite! This was an activity I made myself. All you need are "eyeballs" and an egg carton. I bought little plastic eyeballs from the Dollar Tree (literally my favorite store ever) and then stole an egg carton from my fridge (thanks mom!). If I wouldn't have thought about this the night before I needed it, I would have painted it black to look more Halloweeny. Anywho, I wrote the numbers 0-11 in each slot on the inside of the carton with a permanent marker. Then I put two eyeballs in the carton. Shake away and you have yourself an addition game! (Make sure you use a foamy carton as they have more room than the cardboard ones) I also created a response sheet that is FREE here, where they write their number sentence each time they have a turn.
Station #3: Fill Your Candy Bag!
This station worked on so many different math skills: number sense, addition and subtraction, reasoning, etc. I got this game from a TPT store and I really like it! We used pennies as our counters and the students had to record each roll they made (so I knew they were being honest).
Station #4: Boo Bump!
This was a game that I combined from two different games I saw in my blog stalking :) We took the "game" from the rules of Boo Bump (which was a way more exciting name!) Most of my kiddos are not ready to all 3 addends yet, so we used a different game board for two dice instead. We used the same rules of bumping and locking and all that fun stuff! Some of my kids were able to play with three dice however, so it was nice to have both options.
Station #5: Halloween Web
This activity was a little bit more creative for the kids. I had my tub of Halloween books out in my library and the students were to choose one just right book to read. After they read their book, they filled out a Halloween web that I found FREE here, with words that describe or remind them of Halloween. At this point in the year, we use our best guess spelling, and I think my favorite one was "vmpyyr." Vampire! Why the double y? Beats me.
Station #6: Candy Tasting
What could be more fun than candy tasting? This was definitely the favorite station of the day! When the students entered this station, they "taste-tested" a piece of candy of their choice. They then had to fill out a tree map about candy, "Candy: tastes, looks, is...." If they wrote 4 answers under each branch, they got to eat ANOTHER piece of candy. Talk about movtivation!
Station #7: Halloween Scrambled Sentences
We are forever trying to learn correct sentence structure in our class. I cannot even count how many times I have sent my friends back to their desk for forgetting to use capital letters at the beginning of their sentence and using punctuation. At this station, I found these wonderful Halloween scrambled sentences from Doodle Bugs Teaching. I love that there was a picture included to help the students out!
Station #8: Pumpkin Glyph
This was the first glyph that we did in our class, and we did pretty good! The only issue we had was that the students were not happy with the shapes they were assigned based on their answers haha! But the pumpkins looked really cute afterwards!
Station #9: Spooky Words ABC Order
We have been working on ABC order for the last few weeks and we are awesome at it! Initially, we were only going to alphabetize to the first letter, but my kiddos were not having that. They wanted to do it completely correctly. So this activity could be done alphabetizing to the first letter, or to the second or third. So I made these Spooky Words ABC Order cards and a response sheet that you can have as a freebie :)
Station #10: M and N Ending Sound Sort
This game is so cute and it works with the m and n sound (which we confuse sometimes) and ending sounds. I am so sad because I cannot find this file ANYWHERE. Ahh! I must have printed it and forgot to save it! If I find it, I will add it in! So not that there is anything to go with it, but here is the repsonse sheet that I made.
I hope that you liked our stations! If you have any questions about them, ask away. We had SO much fun doing them and the kids ask me all the time when we can play them again!
Enjoy the rest of your week :)
Sarah
