No Tricks, Just Treats: Halloween Read Aloud Mini Lessons that Work

October 31st is fast approaching, which can only mean one thing - your students have costumes and candy on the brain.

As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them! Incorporating lesson plans that are based on Halloween-themed read alouds honors your students' need to celebrate and your need to keep an eye on the academic prize. Luckily, BookPagez’s ready-to-use resources make it easy to turn your literacy block into a frightfully good time while staying focused on building reading comprehension.

A Week's Worth of Read Aloud Resources for Halloween

Competing for your students' attention when classroom chatter is focused on what everyone is going to be for Halloween is a challenge. That's why you need Oscar. Oscar is a dog. He is a half-a-dog tall and one-and-a-half dogs long. He is also the star of the show in Dav Pilkey's The Hallo-Wiener. Because of his unusual size, Oscar gets made fun of – a lot. So when Oscar’s mother makes him dress up as a hot dog in a bun for Halloween, Oscar’s problems go from bad to worse. Students will laugh out loud as they learn about text structures, use picture clues to make inferences, determine importance, and make predictions about events in this fun Halloween read aloud.

So arm yourself with a copy of the book and this set of The Hallo-Wiener read aloud resources because we've got a week's worth of instruction brimming with Halloween fun.

MONDAY With just the right amount of suspense, The Hallo-Wiener is an ideal read aloud to model making predictions. Gather your students and use the step-by-step mini lesson to focus on making predictions about story events and character behavior. TUESDAY Depending on the needs of your students, you can read the book again and focus on another comprehension strategy, or you can use the Making Predictions Reader's Notebook Prompt to practice writng about reading. WEDNESDAY Do your students know the meaning of the words ghastly or ornery? How about hounded? Give your students' vocabularies a boost by playing memory using the interactive sorting cards included in the resource set. THURSDAY Test your students' comprehsion and recall with a game of True or False Trick or Treat. The included game board and true or false game cards will keep even your most ghoulish little goblins engaged and focused on reading skills. FRIDAY It turns out that Oscar has a lot of nicknames. His mother calls him "her little Vienna Sausage" and the cats in his neighborhood thinks he's a "Frankfurter". Use this play on words to finish the week with an interactive mini lesson focused on synonyms.