These are some of my favorite Halloween Books.  There are so many different activities and crafts you can pair with each book.  I will be reading all these books this month with different groups or when teaching whole class lessons in my classrooms!

Ten Timid Ghosts is great book to work on counting, rhyming, and Halloween vocabulary terms. For the book Ten Timid Ghosts I created some pictures to pair with the book along with both visual and written comprehension questions.  I also had one of my classes act out this book.

Here is how I set up the book activity.  I placed a small piece of hard Velcro on each set of 2 pages except for the first set of pages that needs 2 pieces of Velcro and the rest need only one piece of Velcro per set of pages (i.e 3 & 4 a Velcro dot, 5 & 6 a Velcro dot, etc.)  On the first page one Velcro dot will be for the number 10 picture and the other one for the witch picture.  You can see which picture goes on each set of pages by using the question sheets.  I laminated all the book pictures and place soft Velcro on the back of each picture.  I store the pictures on the Book Pictures Grid Page.  This makes it easy to see all the pictures.

The structure of the activity varies depending on level of my students.  I read one page at a time and I stop after each page for the student to find the correct picture to match the book page.  For some of my lower functioning students, I give the student a choice of only 2 or 3 pictures while other groups I may use present all the pictures for the student to scan and determine the needed picture.

Question Time

I use both visual questions and written questions while reading the book or as a follow up activity after I finish the story depending on my students’ ability.  Sometimes I read a page of the book and have the student answer the question on his/her sheet that corresponds to the page I just read.  This often helps with my students who are working on comprehension skills but have difficulty retaining information or need immediate reinforcement.  If I have the students answer the questions after we finish reading the book I often refer back to the book since there are lots of items for the students to remember.  I often place the pictures of the items the ghosts saw in the order to help the students.

ACT IT OUT!

I read this book as an integrated session in one of my kindergarten classrooms and it worked out really well.  Here is how I set up the “Act It Out” reading activity.  I had one student be the witch (you can even have that student wear a witch’s hat) and then I handed out the other 10 Halloween pictures of the items the ghost sees throughout the book to other students (skeleton, bat, ghoul, etc).

I had all the student who represented ghosts stand in a row at the front of the room.  I read the first page of the book and had the witch come up to the front of the room too.  I asked “who moved in the haunted house?”  as the witch came over and stood by the ghosts.  I read the next page “one saw a skeleton and let out a whine.  He flew to the woods and then there were nine.”  I had the student holding the skeleton say “oh no a skeleton” and then that student left the group and went to the side which we determined was the woods.  Then we counted the number of ghost left at the front of the room.  I continued to read the story and each student identify the item the ghost saw and then moved off to the side which was the “woods”.  Every time we continued to count down as the ghosts flew off to the woods.  When all the ghosts were in the woods we acted out being mad and gave angry faces.  I had different students say something about how the ghosts felt.  For example, one student ghost said “I feel mad” and another said “I want my house back”.  My students in this classroom are working on various language goals so I tried to include lots of “wh” questions while reading the book along with multiple opportunities for the students to use different vocabulary terms, verbs, adjectives, and 2-4 word utterances.  At the end of the story, I had the ghosts say “BOO” to the witch and had the witch fly away from the group.

Download for FREE here: 10 Timid Ghosts Book

Hope your students enjoy reading this Halloween Book!!!!