Book Review: Spooky Stories Aloud

When my daughter was younger it seems like spooky stories were an all-year thing, with “The Ghost and Jenny Jemima” a regular feature. Whether you’re looking for a readaloud for the classroom or home, Spooky Poems Aloud is a fun one for Halloween season and beyond.

It includes 20 poems written by Joseph Coleho and illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett. They include poems of different styles such as limericks, poems with repeating lines, rhyming and non-rhyming. One poem loses a line every stanza, while another repeats an onomatopoeia. There’s also a renga, which is made up of tanka poems (lines of five syllables, then 7, then 5, 7 and 7), a pantoum and a villanelle, both of which have specific rhyme structures and repeating lines.

Many of the poems suggest that kids try writing one similar, such as a limerick, rules for a club for ghoulish creatures (examples in the book are werewolves and vampires), a poem about a scary plant or writing a poem that incorporates different senses.

This would be fun to do in the classroom, reading the poem from the book and having kids write and illustrate their own version, then share and display in the classroom. Or you could make a class poem around one of the prompts, such as asking kids what pranks they would pull if they were a ghost. One poem asks kids to illustrate the witches’ ball described in one poem, and the illustrations throughout are sure to inspire kids to want to draw their own illustrations to their poems.

This book would be a fun addition to the reading center during spooky season and an easy way to add a little poetry unit in October. Or just read it at home — but not too close to bedtime!

About the book: 40 pages, hardcover, 20 poems. Published 2024 by Wide Eyed Editions, suggested retail price $19.99.

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

Have you read?

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