Making Halloween Educational for Kids

Combine education with fun and you have a winning combination! Here's a few ideas on getting creative with Halloween. Some of these might even make your kids scary smart!

source: https://www.kaplanco.com/blog/post/2014/10/02/Making-Halloween-Educational-for-Kids.aspx




How do you plan to celebrate Halloween in your classroom? Will you have a costume parade, throw a Halloween party, decorate pumpkins, or pass out lots of candy? These and other similar activities will only add to children’s excitement about the holiday, but Halloween-related activities aren’t usually the most educational of activities you can plan for students. In fact, some people may say that these types of activities are a waste of time and resources.

While you can argue that Halloween activities promote family engagement and community in the classroom, intentional teaching (consciously planning activities that have specific purposes) can help you silence the naysayers and make Halloween more educational for kids. Here are four ways you can create satisfying (and fun!) Halloween-related learning experiences for the children in your care:



1. Share Fun Facts - Did you know pumpkins are a fruit? They’re actually berries—yes, berries (we were shocked, too). Providing fun, interesting facts about pumpkins, bats, and other Halloween-related objects and animals can help make any Halloween activity educational for kids. Helpful Tip: Turn the fun facts you come up with into a trivia game that students can play during your Halloween party or while they’re decorating pumpkins.



2. Go Beyond Arts and Crafts - Take students to a local pumpkin patch and let them pick out their own pumpkin for decorating. This is a great opportunity for children to learn about how pumpkins are grown. If you don’t have the budget to go on a field trip, read Pumpkin Pumpkin with your class or ask a local pumpkin farmer to come talk to your class about the growing process. Helpful Tip: Before children decorate their pumpkin, have them record their observations about the pumpkin’s size, color, shape, and other features. You can use their data to create fun and relatable math charts and word problems.



3. Learn About Various Halloween Celebrations - Halloween has a long history and is celebrated in a

number of countries, which gives you a variety of opportunities to teach children about history and diversity. For example, you can discuss how Halloween began in Ireland or share how people in Mexico honor their deceased loved ones on Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). Helpful Tip: Have children create and design a booklet about different Halloween traditions around the world. Make sure you ask them to include their own Halloween traditions.

4. Turn Your Halloween Party into a Halloween Math Party! - Have children estimate how many candy corns or roasted pumpkin seeds are in a jar. Pass out candy and ask students to count or sort their candy pieces. Older children can also use candy pieces to make fractions or practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Helpful Tip: Invite parents to come to your Halloween math party and/or take pictures of students solving math problems and enjoying their snacks. You can post the pictures you take on your classroom blog or send them to parents in an email or newsletter.

So what is your creative idea to keep the kiddos learning? Don't let all that candy turn their brains into mush. Leave us a comment with your best idea.

Athena Learning Center of College Station

Autumn Lesson Ideas

Nothing signals the onset of the fall season more than pumpkins and Halloween. Here's some great idea's to keep the kiddo's engaged and learning.

Source: http://www.athenalearningcenters.com/autumn-lesson-ideas/

Veteran teachers know that from now until after the holidays, it will be a little more challenging to keep the students engaged in what’s going on in the classroom. A good strategy is to incorporate some of the themes that are surrounding them once they leave the campus.

Here are some fun, yet challenging lesson ideas for incorporating autumn into each subject area’s curriculum.

Science: Now’s the time for photosynthesis

Fall is the biggest time of year for photosynthesis. After all, if it wasn’t for the change in the ability of plants to create energy, their leaves wouldn’t fall in the first place. When studying photosynthesis, you can make the lesson as complicated as you want depending on the grade level you’re trying to reach, including various experiments with healthy plants. Age-appropriate explanations for why leaves change color can be found at Science Made Simple.

Math: Get out the pumpkins!

Pumpkins are a natural ally to math teachers everywhere. They come in a variety of weights and sizes, or circumferences and radiuses for geography teachers. Smaller children love to carve them up and use the seeds for various arithmetical exercises, while the older kids can start working on more complicated tasks including building their own pumpkin-chucking machine for studying trajectory and laws of motion. They make the room smell nice, too.

Social Science: Track the foliage

This works particularly well as a teaming activity with a science teacher studying photosynthesis (see above). A good place to start is the national foliage map from the Weather Channel. Using various data found online, students can start piecing together what is happening with the foliage around the country. See if they can make some friends on Skype in a place where the colors are quite different from home, especially if you’re teaching in an area where the leaves don’t change. Advanced students can create their own foliage map based on temperature data and other factors.

English/Language Arts: It’s Poe time!

Frankly, the work of Edgar Allan Poe seems out of place in any other season. The imagery is a bit cold and dark, just like fall. Aside from reading his poetry or short stories, take some time to introduce the concept of gothic horror to the students and ask them to create their own stories in the same tradition. Sharing is also important. When students create any writing, it should be written to be read by more than just their teacher. Find some works from other authors with unreliable narration or suspense and run a comparison.

The Next Level

Have you had success with any other fall-themed lesson units? Educate us in the comments below.

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And if you feel your child needs a little more help preparing for this rigorous new curriculum, please find out more about Athena’s tutoring services.