Holiday Activities and Freebies!
As the leaves start to change color and the weather cools off, student excitement tends to increase for the upcoming Halloween season. One of my favorite ways to enjoy this fun time with my students is to share seasonal stories with them. In this post, I’m going to share some of my favorite October read alouds for kindergarten, along with some companion activities that your students will love!
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These are all great stand-alone books to share with your students, but they are also the perfect addition to thematic units. Pairing these books with companion activities can help students extend their learning and comprehension of the story.
One of my favorite thematic units for October is a study of bats! It’s a fun way to bring in some seasonal fun without focusing specifically on Halloween.
I always like to begin a thematic unit with nonfiction read alouds. For example, Bats by Elizabeth Carney is an engaging book for teaching students more about bats. This can set the stage for the rest of your thematic unit by introducing them to new vocabulary that they will use throughout the bat unit activities.
As you read the story together as a class, you can discuss what you’re learning about bats. A graphic organizer like this is a great way for students to document what they’re learning!
Students can then use the graphic organizer to help them write and illustrate their favorite facts about bats in this bat writing craftivity. They can choose one fact from the organizer for each page of the flipbook. These make a great interactive bulletin board display!
You can’t have a bat unit in kindergarten without reading Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. This sweet story is a classic for a reason! Stellaluna is a young bat who gets welcomed into a bird family after being separated from her mom.
There are many great activities that you can use to enhance this read aloud for your students. For example, you can help them practice comparing and contrasting birds and bats with this lift the flap activity.
Students can also practice a variety of story elements by completing an All About Stellaluna book. They can complete pages about the characters, setting, and plot of the story. This is a great way to get students talking about what they read, since they will be excited to take home their story element books and share them with family.
Spiders are often used to add spookiness to the Halloween season, but I love to show kindergarteners that spiders are more interesting than they are creepy!
A read-aloud like Spiders by Laura Marsh is a great way to do this.
After learning more about spiders, students can complete this schema flipbook with their favorite facts about spiders. Then, they can complete a spider craft for the front cover!
This spider craft is another format for students to document what they’re learning about spiders. The completed craft is perfect for a seasonal bulletin board! Students are always so excited to find their creations on display.
Fiction books about spiders are also a great addition to a thematic unit. The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle is one of my favorites!
In this story, a spider is hard at work spinning an intricate web on a fence post. The spider declines many invitations to play throughout the story, choosing to work on the web instead.
The many visitors in the story creates a good opportunity for students to practice sequencing. Students can complete this lift-the-flap activity to put the animals from the story in the order that they visited the spider.
It wouldn’t be October in kindergarten without some pumpkin activities! One of my favorite ways to start a pumpkin unit is to learn about the pumpkin life cycle.
From Seed to Pumpkin by Jill McDonald uses kid-friendly language and illustrations to describe the life cycle of a pumpkin, so it’s a great read-aloud option.
After learning more about the pumpkin life cycle, students can complete their own pop-up books about how a pumpkin grows. Each page has a pop-up illustration of the stage, with room for students to add a label. They are always so excited to take their completed books home to share with their families!
One of my favorite fiction read-alouds about pumpkins is The Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Steven Kroll.
This fun book tells the story of two mice who are secretly caring for the same pumpkin for two very different reasons. Once they discover what is happening, they decide to work together so that both mice can reach their goal.
A fun companion activity for this read-aloud is to have students compare and contrast the mice from the story using a Venn diagram. This is very helpful for reading comprehension development!
You can also incorporate some real-life pumpkin measuring into your lesson plans. Students can then create a book that summarizes the different non-standard measurements they completed. They can also write and illustrate a sentence about the class pumpkin.
All of the read-aloud companion activities that I shared in this post (and many more!) are included in one easy-to-download bundle of thematic units for October. You’ll find everything you need to plan a bat, spider, or pumpkin unit for your kindergarten class.
If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this bundle, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or in my TPT store.
Be sure to save this post so you can come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite kindergarten board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these read-alouds and activities when you’re putting together your lesson plans for October.
