Happy Halloween

On 31st October, we celebrated Happy Halloween in Room 18: through Maths, Word Study, Art and Science.  Desk inspection was scary as everyone had cobwebs and spiders in their desks and tote trays!

The jack-o-lantern smelt like burnt pumpkin as the candle cooked the lid!

First we did Halloween Maths.  We had to join pairs of numbers that make 10, 100 or even 1,000 to make scary cobwebs.

Later on, we worked out Halloween word problems.  Some people worked independently using their multiplication and division skills,  while other people used counters in the Halloween workshop with Mrs Bear.

For lunch, we made spider sandwiches, but thankfully NOT with real spiders!  We used vegemite for the body, and either sticks of cucumber or carrot for the legs.  Then we used red food colouring for the eyes and mouth.

After lunch, we had Spooky Word Study with jelly googly eyes.  We had to write all the words we could think of with the 'OO' chunk.

Afterwards, we could choose one Halloween sweet from the Skull because no one really wanted to eat the googly eyes when they had felt pen all around the edge - there were jelly googly eyes, false teeth or cut off fingers to choose from.

We also did spooky Halloween Art, but this took several days.  First we looked very closely at our hands to see where the finger bones were.   We bent our finders, rotated our wrists and made a fist to see our knuckles.  Then we drew an outline of our hand, and made little lines to show each join.  Next we drew in each bone, separating them at each join and coloured in the spaces between.  The last part was to carefully paint the bones with oil to make them see-through.  When they were dry, we stuck them to the window.  When the light shines through, they look just like X-rays!

Later on, we did some Halloween Science and learned about physical change and chemical change.  We looked at all sorts of changes and decided in which group they belonged.  We  classified things like melting ice, mixing sand in water or chopping wood as physical change because they stayed the same, but we classified making toast and slime and baking cakes as chemical change because things changed and you could not change them back again.

At the end of the day, little groups of people went into the Halloween Cave with a glow stick - was this a physical change or a chemical change?  Can we change the glow stick back, or not?  We thought about this as we whirled them around in the dark.  What do you think?