October is always such a fun month because there are so many great Halloween themed books and activities to use with my students.  I thought I would give you a quick overview of all the different Halloween Books Companions I have created along with some other free Halloween activities I have made to help with October lesson planning!!!  Hope some of these resources will be helpful for your students.  If you click on the name of each book it will bring to the previous blog post about how to use the book and other activities to pair with the book.  These are must have books for me!   At the end of the post I will have all the links to the Free Book Companions.

10 Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O’Connell – Help your students count down from 10 ghosts to none as the witch scares all ghosts to the forest!    

Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler – The witch keeps picking up animals on her broom until it breaks!!!  Find out what happens to the witch and all her animal friends with this book.

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat by Lucille Colandro – Of course there is an Old Lady book for this holiday.  She keeps swallowing different Halloween items until her belly is full!!!!

There Was An Old Mummy Who Swallowed a Spider by Jennifer Ward – Check out all the different Halloween items this old mummy swallows!

The Spooky Wheels on the Bus by J. Elizabeth Mills – Have your students count up from 1 to 10 all the different Halloween items on the bus and the silly sounds they make.  The book is catchy and interactive for the students.

Have your students sort the different Jack-O-Lanterns by size.  There are some variations depending on your students’ skill level and exposure to size concepts.  Some of my students are just starting to learn about size concepts so they needed a lot of prompting to help them place the jack-o-lantern in the correct spot.  The focus for these students is receptively being able to sort the two different sizes.

Another receptive task I used with my students who are staring to understand big/small concepts is I held up a big and small jack-o-lantern and I provided a verbal instruction including the size concept.  For example, “take big” or “find the big jack-o-lantern”.   Then I could take some good data on following a 1-step direction involving a size concept!

You can also use this as an expressive language task.  Hold up one of the jack-o-lanterns and have your student verbally or with an AAC system tell you the size concept.  Once they tell you “big” or “small” you can hand them the pumpkin and he/she can place it in the correct spot.  Lots of practice for those size concepts.

For this activity the students need to determine if the set of words on the ghost are synonyms or antonyms and place it in the correct spooky house.  The activity includes 45 synonym and 45 antonym pairs so you can get a lot of practice out of this sort!

Some of my students needed more support and prompting then others.  For some students I read the pair of words and may have paired each word with a symbol or gesture to help them identify if the two words were similar or different.

Click the links if you are interested in either of these activities –

Big and Small Jack-o-Lantern Sort

Spooky Synonym and Antonym Sort

Free Book Companion Links

10 Timid Ghosts Book

Room on the Broom

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Bat

There Was An Old Mummy Who Swallowed A Spider

The Spooky Wheels on the Bus