Yup totally clear and concise that title is… anyway!

On the suggestion of a good friend due to mass mosquito annoyance I decided I would love a bat house. How better to expedite this than to do a BAT UNIT that ends with Daddy and kids making one such thing? Yup totally being devious here! Enter the book Stellaluna. And all the resources here in. Which I will now share with you!!

First of all the book – Stellaluna… check it out HERE. Now onto the fun stuff. I managed to find a free lapbook on Homeschool Share HERE, and more helpful pages:

• Teachers Pay Teachers thanks to Promoting Success HERE
• About.com finger puppet craft HERE
• KidsSoup.com printable for counting HERE
• Classroom Fun has some resources HERE
• Little Miss Glamour Goes to Kindergarten has some helpful printables HERE
• For the pages I printed off on Education.com you can check my collection HERE
• We also used EnchantedLearning HERE
• And of course Activity Village, they are our go to place for printables HERE
• First Grade Wow has a fun printable HERE

For Halloween we really just went with the flow. Trick or treating… decorating for the season… We watched Room on the Broom of course. And of course, read the book HERE. I have a Halloween collection on Education.com HERE that you can check out. Oh and of course, Activity Village – HERE.

We had a few bat books we used for our unit!

• Bats by Michael George
• What’s Awake? Bats by Patricia Whitehouse
• We Both Read About Bats by Sindy McKay
• When I lived with Bats by Faith McNulty
• Outside and Inside Bats by Sandra Markle

I let Emanuel and Trinity assemble their lapbook as they pleased with minimal interference. It was a great wrap up on a unit they got really interested in! Seriously, there are so many interesting bats out there – our favourites were the fruit bat and the bumblebee bat.

We did a mini unit on Owls right after to continue our nocturnal animals/Halloween theme. You can check out my Education.com collection HERE. And of course, go to Activity Village for their printouts HERE. We had a few interesting books:

• National Geographic Kids Owls by Laura Marsh
• Owls by Josh Gregory
• Snowy Owls by Ruth Owen
• And a lovely story called Owl Babies by Martin Waddell

We printed out all the fun and interesting pages we could find and worked on a full on folder of interesting owl facts.

Of course all of this culminated in HALLOWEEN and COSTUMES! So enjoy the images! This year Zander was a wizard, Gavin a pirate, Emanuel a Storm Trooper (he demanded the light saber), Trinity Dorothy off of the Wizard of Oz and Miss Echo the Queen of Hearts thank to costume components from Aunty Shandai.

We trick or treated with our homeschool buddies for the first time! And did quite nicely.

All in all, a great Halloween!

So this year we had FIVE homemade costumes… I don’t think we have ever had so many to make! Ken and I each had some part in an aspect of each costume. Be it crochet or sewing. I think they turned out rather well and all were done the day BEFORE Halloween!!!

We did a costume try on on Friday in the backyard with out amazing leaves. I was so pleased to see that everything fit well and that the kids were all happy with their costumes.

We have a tiny witch…

Rapunzel…

A triceratops…

An ice wizard…

And a fire wizard…

Ken even made the staffs from the limbs of trees Baba cut down last month.

The hats were all made from the witch’s pattern on crochetspot.com. I have a toddler version up for sale on my Etsy store if anyone is interested HERE.

I used another crochetspot.com pattern for Trinity’s flowers. We sewed those to a fabric headband and then tied ribbons to the back which were braided into her hair.

Ken was 100% in charge of the cloaks! Didn’t he do a great job?

For our resident dinosaur I found a great pattern for a Triceratops hat thanks to Ida Rott HERE. And then Ken made the tail and the gloves with claws. (his overalls outfit thing and Trinity’s dress were lucky Goodwill finds as was Echo’s broom)

I, myself even gave dressing up a go and went as a gamer girl… Ken had to have a photograph… the shirt said Do Not Disturb I am Playing Video Games… I think he just wanted a visual record of the fact I was actually wearing jeans and socks. Men.

We did our yearly traditional trick or treat with the Novaks and then hang out after. This year we came early and had pizza. The kids had a blast and we came home with WAY TOO MUCH candy!

Jacob and Echo

We did not do a full on Halloween unit this year… what with the printer being mean and refusing to allow the ink to last (we think there may be a leak… devastating for a homeschool family…) and the busy busy life we have had I simply did not have the time. However, we did do some great print outs from Activity Village HERE, and read some amazing books… oh and watched a couple films! So I will share that info below!

Free hot chocolate!

Movies:

• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• The Haunted History of Halloween (The History Channel) I have also included a link that has information all about Halloween thanks to the History Channel HERE

Books:

• Halloween by Natalie M. Rosinsky HERE
• Halloween by Mari C. Schuh HERE
• Halloween and the Day of the Dead Traditions Around the World by Joan Axelrod-Contrada HERE
• The Story of Halloween by Carol Greene HERE
• John Pig’s Halloween by Jan L. Waldron HERE
• Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson HERE
• Trick or Treat, It’s Halloween by Linda Lowery and Richard Keep HERE
• H is for Haunted House by Tanya Lee Stone HERE
• Skeleton Shake by Liz Conrad HERE
• Halloween Is… by Gail Gibbons HERE

Gavin chose to do a quick fact list on Mummies so he used to following two books for that:

• Ancient Egyptian People by Sarah McNeill HERE
• Mummies & Their Mysteries by Charlotte Wilcox HERE

Echo and Zombie Alex

Kids with their Halloween treats from Gammie and their popsicle stick and yarn spider webs

Pizza!

Beyond costumes and candy, trick or treating and jack-o-lanterns we decided to have a study of all things Halloween.

Lapbooks:

• For the younger two – Homeschool Helper Online’s free lapbook by JoAnn S. HERE
• For the twins I bought a lapbook off of Currclick “The History of Halloween” HERE

For our pumpkin section for the little ones we used worksheets from Mama’s Learning Corner HERE. There are different levels of complexity for the worksheets though we chose to do all 3 together. We used two different books for our life cycle research. A storybook called Pumpkin Cat by Anne Mortimer and then a section out of the book Exploring Autumn by Sandra Markle.

We used a long list of interesting and fun books:

• Halloween by Gail Gibbons (I used this book to have the twins try and pick out facts and ideas of interest as I read. A nice basic intro on Halloween)
• Halloween by Mari C. Schuh
• Halloween is… by Gail Gibbons
• The Halloween Book of Facts & Fun by Wendie Old
• National Geographic Kids Halloween by Laura Marsh
• Halloween by Natalie M. Rosinsky
• The Story of Halloween by Carol Greene
• Halloween and Day of the Dead (Traditions Around the World) by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Story Books:

• Halloween Sky Ride by Elizabeth Spurr
• All Hallows Eve: The Story of the Halloween Fairy by Lisa Sferlazza Johnson
• Alpha Oops! H is for Halloween by Alethea Kontis
• Katie’s Tricky Treat by Slade Stone (a great book that deals with peer pressure on Halloween)
• Trick or Treat, It’s Halloween by Linda Lowery
• Room on the Broom by Axel Scheffler
• Clifford’s First Halloween by Norman Bridwell
• H is for Haunted House by Tanya Lee Stone
• Spooky Beasts: Thunder and Lightning by Karen Wallace

Videos/movies:

• The Haunted History of Halloween by The History Channel (a little dry but some unexpectedly interesting facts, did you know the county of Anoka here in Minnesota is the Halloween Capital of the USA?)

For one of our lapbook activities I broke the kids up in pairs… one twin per little kid and they worked on defining some Halloween words. I used an online kid (mostly) friendly dictionary instead of straight Google. The littles typed the words in and the twins read them out and wrote out the definitions. You can find our choice HERE… Wordsmyth. I loved that I could pick the level of difficulty of the definitions. We chose beginner.

The littles also covered Spiders and Bats… We had two books – for bats: Bats by Gail Gibbons and for spiders: Spiders by Seymour Simon. The pictures in that one were a little too big for myself and Emanuel. Totally NOT fans of spiders but we managed! Since the life cycle of a spider can be a wee bit complicated I found a site that had a printable we could colour and glue into our books… from BlockPub.com HERE.

The 4 main festivals of Samhain were covered in the wiki page HERE. Though we did get our info from the small blurb on the Google search page, not the whole article.

Live Science had a great article on the history and origins of Halloween HERE.

The history of the term bonfire or BONEfire. Off of SuperBeefy.com HERE.

As always hunt on Activity Village by looking up Halloween for a lovely variety of resources HERE.

AND Education.com you can check out the file I had made for the sheets I have set aside to use over the last couple years HERE.

So I hope these are helpful! I know I will be referring back to this next year!