I live in TN and alot of schools here tell us not to celebrate Halloween at all. The most we can do is read "Cliffords Halloween" or "Franklins Halloween". No real party or jack-o-lantern, ghost, witch, monster talk.....just pumpkins, night animals, and spiders. Anyone else have to do this?!?!
I'm sad! I LOVE PARTIES and special days!
I'm still makin slime ON Halloween and something special!
Our school has fall parties. We can't offend the one or two families that don't "celebrate" Halloween, but still remove their children from all activites. On the other hand these families that don't want Halloween do want to keep Christmas, but the school won't allow any Christian songs sung at Christmas, because of the hand full on opposers. To many complaints just eliminate all activities unfortunately. When will they learn that you can't please everyone.
Our fall parties Kindergarten get to dress up in costumes of their choice.(With in reason: no blood, weapons, etc.) First grade dress up as "Who do you want to be when you grow up?" . Second grade dress up as their favorite animals and Third grade do a book report and dress up as one on the characters in their book. Fourth and Fifth pretty much don't do anything. K-3 have a costume parade through the school.
It is better than nothing but I think it is not allowing the children to just be kids. Poor parents have to come up with a second costume for Halloween, because little Billy didn't want to be a poodle for Trick or Treat.
To many rules aren't necessarily the best because administration is trying to "fix a problem".
My school is having a harvest festival. No costumes allowed. We did it last year. It was so much fun. They have carnival type of activities set up for the little kids. The older kids "run" the activity. An example would be throwing bean bags into the clown's mouth, Estimating how many fall colored kisses are in the jar, bowling, and there's always face painting. It is usually all afternoon. We started having problems with costumes that were way to scary for small kids, kids would leave their costumes at school-and they wouldn't have them for Halloween night, and parents would dress up to the point no one would know who they were. For safety reasons alone, all schools stopped just because of the adults dressing up. I thought it was a good idea and still do with all the terrible things that have happened.
I teach at a Catholic School. All the public schools in town had "gotten rid" of their Halloween parties, so we did too.
I do a monster theme about this time, and last year I got together with the other gr 2 teacher in my school and had a monster party with stations. We had a food station where they made worms and dirt (what monsters might eat : ), some monster PE games, a monster poetry station, a monster story station,a monster math station, and a reader's theatre station. It was a lot of fun, and the kids didn't feel that they "missed" a Halloween party. As well I liked that they were doing educational activities to boot.
We have a harvest festival. Each of our 5 kindergartens will come up with an activity such as painting, play doh, decorating a cookie and so on. We rotate around each of our classrooms and have parents running the different activities. We love it and so do the students. Jeanne
We don't have Halloween parties at my school, nor do we dress up any more. Kindergarten used to do a party, and the p.e. coach would do a mini-carnival in her gym during p.e. time, and the older kids could dress up, but it got out of hand. We did away with the costumes after one child dressed as a car wreck victim! We repeatedly asked parents not to dress their children in gross or overly scary costumes and not to put a lot of make-up on them, but they would never comply so we just stopped it. Also we must comply with the no foods of minimal nutritional value rules, so no candy except for the 3 allowed times, which our school chose to be Xmas, Valentine's and Easter.
We do Halloween activities throughout the month in the classrooms, however. In order not to offend those who don't "do" Halloween, we make our units educational--we study the human skeleton, spiders, and pumpkins from a scientific standpoint but display all our work, so it looks festive. If I don't have children in my class in a particular year that object to Halloween, I will choose worksheets with Halloween clipart, and will do Halloween art work.
I use the pumpkins and have the kids measure (after predictions) the weight, height, diameter, circumference, etc. Then find the difference between their estimations and the actual. measurement. They count the ribs, label as odd or even, They name it and write about it. We read about the types of pumpkins. Some years we estimate the seeds, count them, and bake them for a snack. Every once in a while we do carve them, but only geometrically.The kids love it.
When I was in school we had a great time with Halloween--the costumes, parties, and all of that. I loved it, and I considered it to be one of the hallmarks of childhood. Even back when I was doing my student teaching back in the mid 80's, kids did literature activities, added the witches corn in math, and did cute art projects with jack-o-lanterns, etc. However, it seems as if we have gotten away from such fun because so many are offended by Halloween, and some even feel it's an anti-Christian festivity.
In my last school, we solved that problem by having a schoolwide "fall festival." We took the kids to various large areas of the school building and did a lot of the traditional fall activities, such as bobbing for apples; getting face paintings; etc. The kids didn't dress in costume, but we still had fun.
You could also ask the children if they think a pumpkin will float or not and then show them. Maybe add some other objects. Kids are always amazed that pumpkins float.
Make chocolate pudding and put a gummy worm in it.
We took paper cups and put 1/4 of a box of pudding in each cup. And added a 1/4 of the milk to each cup. I can't remember the exact amounts. Add a gummy worm.
Spiders. An Orea cookie and add four pieces of rope licorices for legs and two dots of frosting OR 2 raisins for eyes.
10-05-2006, 11:31 PM
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