Halloween Celebrations in your Classroom

Halloween is an annual celebration observed in a number of countries on October 31st.  It is a mixture of celebration and superstition.  The name "Halloween" comes from "All Hallows' Evening" which is the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows or Saints.  Pope Gregory III designated the first of November as a time to honour all saints and martyrs.  Prior to that, it was an ancient Celtic festival "Samhain" during which bonfires would be lit and costumes worn to ward off roaming ghosts.  It was believed that on this night of the year, spirits and the dead can ross over into the world of the living.  These spirits could take someone into the underworld with them.  In order to avoid such things, people dressed up so as not to be recognized by the spirits.

Today, Halloween activities include trick-or-treating for candy, holding and attending costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, and playing pranks on people to scare them.  Visiting haunted attractions and telling scary stories are also very popular. 



Happy Halloween greetings at www.FreeTiiuPix.com
 

Why not dress up your lesson plans with PNG images of pumpkins and Jack-o-Lanterns.  Have a Halloween party and decorate your classroom!

Here are some fun Halloween party ideas for your class:


Halloween Memory Game

Get some Halloween related items and place them on a tray.  You should have about 15-25 small items from your local dollar store.  Things like plastic spiders, eyeballs, skulls, pumpkins, mice, ghosts, etc. are good choices.  If you have a large class, think about having several trays with students working in groups.  Cover the trays with a cloth.

Remove the cloth to reveal the items on the tray and tell students that they are to try to memorize as many items as they can within 45 - 60 seconds.  When the time is up, place the cloth back onto the tray.  Students will now write down as many items from the tray as they can remember.  The student or group that remembers the most items correctly is the winner.  You can change up this game by playing in rounds, or changing or adding items to the tray.


Scary Story Time

The object of this literacy game is to begin with a scary idea and to build upon it.  This game/assignment may involve the entire class, a small group, or be used as a writing assignment for individual study.

The teacher will have idea cards to begin a story.  Students will repeat the beginning phrase and add their idea to continue the story.  Each student will take their turn and be given an allotted amount of time to continue telling the story - 30-60 seconds works best.  The next student will repeat the last line and try to move the story in another direction.  You can add atmosphere to your class by turning off the lights and have the student talking hold a flashlight under their chin.

This idea is also great for individual writing assignments.  The teacher may provide several phrases as beginning lines to write a creative story.  Stories may be shared in the classroom.

Story beginning phrase ideas:  (Adjust as age-appropriate for your classroom.)

It was a dark and stormy night when...
When the lightning lit up the night sky, I could see...
The witch laughed and in a squeaky voice said...
Peeking in through the window was...
My worst fears were coming true.  Right behind me....
Out of the dark woods crawled...
The motionless figure laying on the ground suddenly...
The dogs ran in fear, for right behind them...


Bake Sugar Cookie Dough - Halloween Fingers

2 cups all purpose flower
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup or 1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract  (use the real stuff, not the artificial)
Blanched, skinless whole almonds
Red food colouring
Powdered sugar

Mix flower, baking powder and salt.  Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Beat in the egg and vanilla.  Gradually add the flower mixture.  Wrap dough in plastic and either freeze or place in fridge until firm (about 40 minutes).

Roll dough into finger-sized logs about 3 inches long.  Make three perpendicular lines with a knife's edge on the middle of the fingers to represent knuckle lines.  Press a whole almond onto the tip of the "finger" to look like a fingernail.  The pointed end of the almond should point away from the finger.  Bake in a 325 degree oven for about 10-12 minutes.  Cool completely on a wire rack.

If desired, mix a little powdered sugar and water to make a thin icing.  Colour the icing with red food dye and "paint" each fingernail red.

These Halloween "finger" cookies make a fun addition to any classroom Halloween party.

Optional:  I've seen green food dye added to the dough mixture.  A light hint of green and you can call these cookies "witch's fingers"!  Enjoy.

Using Images to Enhance Student Learning

It’s an animal that’s about the size of a Loonie (that’s a Canadian dollar coin to you non-Canadians), but sometimes it can grow to be heavier than a small child.  It’s usually green, but some are also shades of brown and black.  Some are “painted” with a yellow streak.  It has small eyes and flaring nostrils along with four stout legs.

Do you know what animal I’m describing?  Neither might your child or a student.  If I further continue my description to include that on some species of this animal, its tail looks like that of a dinosaur, can you now guess the animal?  Probably not.

If, however, I were to post or show you a picture of the animal I was describing, I am sure that at any age, almost everyone would be able to identify it.   Perhaps not the specific scientific name of the animal, but you would certainly be able to identify the species.

Learning, at any age, takes repetition. Have you ever watched a young child watch the same video over and over until they “get” it?  My aged mother has to repeat a new telephone number many times before as she says “it sinks into my old brain”.  But repetition of the same method of learning is not as good as being exposed to new material or a new concept in a variety of ways.  Just as we use our senses of touch, taste and smell to identify a food, learning about new concept, or, in this case a new animal, is made easier by the use of a variety of teaching methods in order to comprehend and grasp the new idea. One of the best learning methods is visual – seeing a picture.

Compare my talking about a “Teasel”, to that of seeing a picture of one.  A Teasel, by the way, is a genus of a flowering plant in the Disacaceae family known as Dipsacus.  It’s an amazing specimen of plant with lavender flowers located on prickly heads that form on tall stems.  The plant blooms on the heads in an outward fashion resulting in what looks like a purple floral belt.  The flowers continue to open blooming towards the top and bottom of the head leaving a barren cone where the spent flowers were.  Get the idea?  I’ll bet an image would help?

 

Teasel (Teazel or Teazle)
Although rather pretty,
Dipsacus is considered an invasive species.

Have you ever wondered where the term “a picture is worth a thousand words” came from?  Believed to have come from an article written by Fred R. Barnard used to promote images in advertising, the phrase affirms that a visual image can easily take the place of a lengthy, textual description.

Educators, be they teachers or parents, are ever in search of images to enhance their lessons.  In fact, students also have a great need for photographs for school projects and assignments.  Neither has much time to spend on research nor wants to expend the effort it takes to register and become a member of a website only to get access to a limited amount of free materials.  Paying for image resources – have you seen a teacher’s budget or a student’s allowance lately? – is usually out of the question.  Cutting and pasting images from your search engine’s internet image search result pages may result in your using images that are copyrighted.  Such usage is the same as stealing the work of others.

Find good sites that offer free images, bookmark them and check often for new materials.  If you do find a website that offers free photographs, read the Terms of Use carefully.  Ensure they hold the copyrights to the images and be very sure you understand what you can and cannot do with the pictures.  Be aware of any restrictions or requirements there may be for you to use and download the photos.

The animal described above, by the way, was a snapping turtle.  The reference to “painted” is in relation to Northern Ontario’s wide-spread Painted Turtle species. 

 

Tiiu Roiser  BAA, BEd.

 

Classroom ideas:  Use images -- to decorate your classroom, make vocabulary flash cards, include in slide presentations, add to your handouts & worksheets, provide as a resource for your students, and as inspiration for art work.  Images can help to illustrate items and sentence structure for English as a Second Language (ESL) students and may assist them in expressing their needs.  Consider making a picture book for young students.

 

To enhance your lesson plans and/or student projects, you can download 100% free images from FreeTiiuPix.com  There are no gimmicks and no registration is required.  Just follow the Terms of Use and download high resolution images and slide shows for use in the classroom.

The webmaster and owner of this blog is a retired teacher currently working with young children on a volunteer basis.  Although not a professional photographer, her work has been published on a variety of websites and some of her photographs are part of Environment Canada’s photo bank.  She has developed and maintains an educational website on which she freely shares her photographs and educational resources. 

Fabulous Fungi-Making Spore Prints

Marasmius rotula - "Pinwheel Mushroom"

I have recently become fascinated by the world of fungi, the study of which is called “mycology”.  I found some pretty mushrooms while walking through the woods, took a few shots and then tried to identify them.  That was it, my world was changed forever.  I now walk with my head down, peering into the damp forest underbrush, hoping to find elusive toothed fungi like Hericium coralloides - the Comb Tooth fungi or Hericium americanum with beautiful white cascading  hanging spines. 

Did you know, that fungi are organisms that are made up of networks of tiny, microscopic “threads” which spread themselves throughout the soil?  The individual threads are known as “hypha” and an entire network of hypha is called a “mycelium”.

The mycelium lives in the ground throughout the year, but when the conditions are right, the fungus will want to “bloom” in order to produce and disperse spores to produce new fungi.  The mushrooms we typically see coming out of the ground or growing from rotting timber are actually the fungi “blooming”.  We call these visible spore producing structures “fruiting bodies” or “sporocarps”.



Mycena leaiana

Little knots of hyphae begin to form under the ground and then grow into two parts:  the mushroom’s cap and the stem.  When the knots, called “primoridia” get large enough, the stem and cap get pushed above the ground and become visible to us.

Fruiting bodies grow in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colours.  Some are quite ugly like the dark “Devil’s Urn” which is 12 cm tall and goblet-shaped, or the cute “Lemon Drops” which are small, bright, yellow 3 mm droplets.  There are some that look like orange peels, and the beautiful Amanita Muscaria with its red cap and white speckles.  Some even look like underwater coral! 

While the mycelium remains under the ground all year, the visible mushroom portions live for only a short while.  A single mycelium can produce many mushrooms.

Did you know, that fungi cannot manufacture their own food by means of photosynthesis and that they secrete an enzyme in order to digest parts of their surroundings?  Spores are produced on the “gills” that are typically under the “cap” of the mushroom.  A mushroom will grow tall on its stalk in order to raise its cap higher than its surroundings.  When the spores are released, they fall to the ground and are carried by breezes in the air.  The higher the cap, the further the spores can be dispersed.

 

Identification – With photos in hand, I began to leaf through mushroom identification books and Googled images for comparison, trying to put names to the specimens I'd found. What I found, however, was a whole new world and that proper identification by sight alone is impossible!  Two mushrooms may appear exactly alike with only very slight differences.  One may have a slight indentation in its cap that you may not notice.  The Lactarius and Russula genera are difficult to identify for even the expert fungus enthusiast.  Unlike the Russula, Lactarius mushrooms “bleed” a latex-like fluid.  While looking identical, one may emit a white latex from its gills while the other does not.  Some species look exactly alike except for the colour or pattern of their spores – identified by doing something called taking a spore print. 

I next learned that fungi can be grouped as Sac fungi, Earthballs, Puffballs, Jelly fungi, Stinkhorns, Morels, Corals, Toothed fungi, Brackets, and Boletes.  Spore prints may be pink, brown or light.  Herein I need to mention that there are also slime moulds (Myxomycota) and lichen… but that’s a topic for another day.

 

Fun Classroom Activity – Making Spore Prints

Making a spore print with your students is a great tactile addition to your fungus lesson plan.  You will need:

- fresh mushrooms – picked from the field, not the grocery store;

- a clear sheet of plastic; 

- some type of covering – perhaps a bowl or glass.

Cut or pull off the stalk of the mushroom; place the cap on the sheet of clear plastic with the cap facing down; cover over night with a bowl.  If the mushroom is small, a cup or glass will do as well - I used plastic drinking glasses with my students. 

 

By the morning, the cap will have released its spores onto the plastic and you will see a colour and pattern.  A white sheet of paper works well too, unless your mushroom specimen happens to drop very light spores in which case you will be disappointed thinking you are seeing nothing and will assume this exercise didn't work. Unless you know ahead what colour spores your mushroom will drop, use clear plastic.

Note:  A mushroom will drop spores without the bowl being placed upon it, the bowl merely speeds up the process.

You need to explain to your class that a mushroom’s spores are microscopic and that normally you would not be able to see them.  You can see the pattern and colour of the spores since the mushroom is releasing millions of them! 

 

Note:  There are many toxic mushroom “look-alikes” that resemble edible ones.  You should under no circumstances rely upon my identification of species.  I am not a mycologist and have not done microscopic identification - I have added names to images which I merely THINK resemble the species.  Some mushrooms and fungi are DEADLY poisonous and their effects do not show up until it is too late to save yourself.

 

Resources for your fungi lessons:

 

Free downloadable images of fungi, slimes & lichens from FreeTiiuPix

All you want to know about mushrooms from mushroomexpert.com

Mushrooms of Quebec (Use translate if you can't read French)

Identifying the shape of mushroom caps (Wikipedia)

Visual identification keys at rogersmushrooms.com