Multisensory Monday- Scary Vocabulary

Posted by Brainspring on 4th Oct 2015

designed by freepik.com

Hi everyone,
Welcome to Multisensory Monday! Wish me luck- I’m attempting to post this from my iPad since I’m on the road without my usual computer. Now getting this post up feels like a whole new project with different challenges to overcome. It’s kind of funny how attached we get to doing things a certain way and how disrupted we can feel when small things change. That idea on it’s own could be a blog post (hmm, maybe it will be soon). Today though, I do have a fun, spooky multisensory activity that fits perfectly with the season.

Fall is far and away my favorite time of year and I especially love Halloween-themed activities. To me, it’s a holiday about creativity, imagination and fun with a little of the unknown and spooky mixed in. Today’s activity combines the creative with the spooky for a lesson in vocabulary and word choice.

Scary Vocabulary

For the next few weeks, ask students to pay attention to things they hear about Halloween: t.v. commercials, movies, haunted house advertisements, scary stories or movies, costume packages, candy bags, anything at all that promotes Halloween.
Their job is to keep track of any interesting words they find that are used to describe Halloween. Words like spooky, scary, eerie, terrifying, haunting, sublime, hair-raising, etc. They will keep track of these words on a Scary Vocabulary page. You can print the one I made here Scary Vocabularly (with thanks to freepik.com for the image) or let students create and decorate their own.
Students can then look up the words, or you can select some to look up as a class, to discover the similarities or subtle differences in their meanings. When the week of Halloween comes at the end of the month, have the students harness their own creativity and spookiness and use their Scary Vocabulary words in a fun writing task!
Have fun planning the writing task for your students. It could be a scary story, a radio commercial for a haunted house, a poster advertising a Halloween movie, a new kind of candy, let your own imagination guide you! The more fun you have with this activity, the more engaged your students will be.

Share your ideas for writing tasks below!
Please email me or comment with pictures or stories about how this activity went in your classroom. I would love to post some examples of Scary Vocabulary pages and spooky writing tasks at the end of the month!

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