31 Days of Halloween - Day 14!

CANDY.
THAT IS WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT.

PERIOD.

Now that we have made the facts clear, we can proceed with tonight's favorite Halloween read:

BOO!

By Robert Munsch

This is a story about a boy named Lance who manages to use face paint to give himself the creepiest, scariest face ever! The story has a repetitive element to it. Lance knocks on a door. The neighbor makes some remark about how "cute" he is. (Lance is a boy with a white pillowcase over his head.) As soon as Lance removes the pillowcase and the neighbor gets a look at his face, they scream and faint dead away. (The children love the screaming and fainting part.) Well, Lance manages to clean two neighbors out of all of their candy, plus everything in their refrigerators and freezers. 

Already, Lance's bigger-than-Santa's-toy bag haul gets too big for him to handle, and he has to ask a policeman for help. The policeman drags the huge bag over to Lance's front porch. He doesn't believe that Lance has been to only two houses, so Lance has to scare him also (so he can show him how he did it.)

Finally, Lance is in his own home eating up his goodies when a teenager, who is really too big to be trick or treating anyway, shows up. He sees the gigantic pile of candy Lance has and determines to scare him out of it. He takes off his white pillow case and says "Boo!"

Do you really think he was scarier than Lance? He wasn't. He ran off crying, Lance dragged the extra loot into the house, and he did not run out of candy until next Halloween. 

A Common Core-worthy thinking and writing assignment would be to create a Venn Diagram together on the whiteboard, that details how Lance's Halloween will probably be different from your students' Halloween. Some may not even be allowed to roam the streets anymore, so go ahead and put that in the comparison, too. Maybe they go to some kind of alternate Halloween or Fall Festival Party instead. Once the class has provided details for what could be different, let them have a go at writing about it and adding their own illustration. Expect to see a lot of creepy Lance faces!

A brain break necessary? Want to get the wiggles out? I suggest this extremely creepy version of In the Hall of the Mountain King here:In the Hall of the Mountain King You Tube

Happy Reading!    Till Next Time, Nancy 

PS Yes, it is never right to take somebody else's candy. But you already knew that, didn't you?