Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kindergarten 'Spooktacular Haunted Houses'

For Halloween I used the theme of haunted houses (which every child loves to talk about regardless of age!) to teach primary and secondary colors. To initiate the lesson I taught them the two songs. The primary color song is sung to the theme of '3 Blind Mice' and goes as follows:

Red, yellow, and blue
Red, yellow, and blue
They are the pri-mary colors
They make up all the other colors
Red, yellow, and blue
Red, yellow, and blue

The secondary color song is sung to the 'Cha-Cha' and goes:
Or-ange, green, and pur-ple
Or-ange, green, and pur-ple
They're the secondaries!
They're the secondaries!

For the secondary song I even have them form a train and cha-cha around the room. It's very cute and it really helps the information stick. I'll ask them weeks later what the primary colors are and they'll remember!
Following that introduction I give them shapes I've previously cut out and let them arrange the house. Despite the uniformity in the pre-cuts, its amazing to see how varied the results come out. The next time we met, we reviewed the colors and I read them the book 'In the Haunted House' by Eve Bunting, this sparked a ton of ideas for what they could draw or add to their house. After making a list of their ideas and drawing a few examples (of shutters, ghosts, bats, smoke, brick, ghouls, etc) I let them have at it with crayons and they had a ball! The picture I'm posting is a mini-display I did for my office. (I share an office with the PE teacher, technology teacher, and Spanish teacher because we all push in to classrooms)

Note: the shabby sign the tech teacher put up on the bulletin board exclaiming 'all about me haunted houses' is incorrect and only got put there at the behest of my principal. :)

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