Halloween (Way Overdue)

On Halloween, instead of doing our regular writing workshop, we wrote a book in the style of Eric Carle's Panda Bear, Panda Bear and other books. I had read about the idea somewhere, most likely on someone's blog, and thought it was brilliant. However, as usual, I didn't have it planned out carefully enough. We had read several of Carle's books over the past few weeks. We brainstormed a list of things one might see on Halloween. Then we let students choose the one they wanted to illustrate and told them what item they would be seeing. So, if they picked witch, they drew that and we told them the witch would see a scarecrow. Thank goodness there were three of us in the room! I could never have accomplished this alone (at least not with the lack of planning).

It was fun to see the pages they created. Some of them stuck with the basic bit, "Witch, witch what do you see? I see a scarecrow looking at me." Others got more creative and added things, such as 'flying goblin' or 'whining at me'.

(I'm sure if I had written this post closer to this lesson, I would have had much more profound thoughts to share. Sadly, I've forgotten them all.)