Mr. Giso's Room to Read: DIY Halloween Shaker

BOO!

It's almost here. You know you are excited that it's on a Friday this year, right? No "day after Halloween candy hangovers" to fret over. I'm looking forward to having an little extra Halloween fun myself. I made these Halloween shakers last year, but I never got around to blogging about them. Oh I know that it's so hard to believe that a teacher got too busy, but it's true. This idea was inspired by lots of fellow bloggers out there. If you look around you will see sight word shakers, addition facts shakers, verb shakers, etc. I've made some for spring and for Valentine's Day, too inspired by teachers that are nice enough to share their ideas.

My Halloween shakers start off by recycling those fancy Tropicana orange juice bottles. I use my all time favorite GOOF OFF remover to take off the labels. Let it sit on there for about 10 minutes and peel away.

Next, go to the supermarket and pick up some Goya beans that are black and orange--for obvious reasons. I selected black beans and lentils. It's odd that the bag says red lentils, but believe me, they were orange. Here's the picture to prove it.

For my next trip, I headed to the local craft store to buy some orange glitter and some Halloween trinkets. These eyeballs are actually erasers. In addition, I picked up rubber spiders, skeletons and some fancy glitter pompoms. Oh, I got some candy corn too.

For my next step, I typed up a label for the front of the shaker and a bunch of words to be used to create a spooky Halloween story. To do this, I printed out the words and cut them so that the same word was on the front and back of the cutouts. These words were placed inside the shakers. I laminated them, but I don't think it's necessary. To use this activity, the students get fun Halloween-themed paper, start to write a spooky story, and shake the shaker to find spooky words to incorporate into their story. It's like having a 3D word bank. Check these out!