Halloween Ideas

On Monday, I dropped by to visit Wendy Fischer at Muir Elementary. Her classroom is on the stage. The lights were dimmed with just some colored stage lights on, spooky sounds playing, and a fabulously decorated Halloween backdrop. (I should have taken a picture, but she decorated her white board with a Halloween theme.) Wendy was wearing Halloween colors, earrings, a headband: she looked like Halloween. How fun for those students!
I asked Wendy if I could take video of some of the fun things she was doing. (She didn't know I was going to show up ahead; she was really just prepared and loves what she does.) She obliged, so here are some video clips. I also want to note, Halloween is a great time to teach so many concepts masked as simply having fun. For example, many of our students don't hear minor songs very often, and what better time to teach minor v. major than Halloween?

I believe this is a Shel Silverstein poem. What a great idea.
A few musical concepts that can be extraced:
-steady beat
-strong and weak beats/meter
-crescendo 

Management Tip: use the music as your management tool. Quickly start the song after it ends to prevent children from talking or getting distracted.

This last one I wasn't able to share a video clip of, but here is the music.

This song is in harmonic minor.