Witches Brew and a Halloween Safety Freebie!

I love Halloween! It has always been one of my favorite things to teach about or celebrate in my classroom. I love how excited my students get and as I mentioned in a previous posting, it is a great thing to anchor writing too! Click Here to read more about how to encourage writing in your classroom with a Halloween twist! Another thing that I liked to incorporate into my classroom was Buddy Classes. Each year I would pair up my Kindergarten or First Grade class with a Third or Fourth Grade class. We would then try to develop monthly lessons (usually themed around a holiday) where the students could work together to complete an activity. This worked great because the older students would help out the younger ones and the teachers could then just wander and supervise. Plus it was a great learning experience for both classes. This Withes Brew Project is what we would do for our October buddy lesson.

We would print enough mats for each student to have one and laminate them for future use. We would assign a grade level a particular number mat and print the corresponding record sheet for that mat. For example: all kindergarten students would have mat number one and all third grade students would have mat number two. We would ask  parents to donate supplies for our project by sending home the following letters (which are included in the unit).

By sending the follow up note we eliminated the possibility of ending up with 50 bags of candy corn and nothing else. Once we got all the students together (usually on Halloween if it fell on a school day) we would recite the poem while mixing the ingredients (its really fun to do this in a dollar store caldron) and then pass everything out and let the buddies start working. Once the students were finished and their papers were checked they could eat their witches brew! This activity could also be done as an independent class if you had some parent volunteers. You can grab this fun unit by clicking here.

Now for the Halloween Safety Freebie! I always spend sometime talking about the importance of Halloween Safety with my classes. It was always very difficult to come up with enough Social Studies grades so my team developed this Halloween Safety Test.

 Click Here to grab your free copy! Happy Halloween!