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- Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe
by EDGAR ALLAN POE
- Poe is very easily the best writer
to ever come out of America surpassing even Melville, Whitman,
and Faulkner. The writing is required reading for all who love
words.
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- Something
Wicked This Way Comes
by Ray Bradbury
Editions: Hardcover | Mass
Market Paperback | Library
Binding
- A masterpiece of modern Gothic literature,
Something Wicked This Way Comes is the memorable story
of two boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway, and the evil
that grips their small Midwestern town with the arrival of a
"dark carnival" one October midnight. How these two
innocents, both age 13, save the souls of the town (as well as
their own), makes for compelling reading on timeless themes.
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Halloween
Spook School
Dateline: 9/30/00, Updated for 2007
By Ann Zeise
  
Welcome to our homeschool for little spooks. Our haunted
house meets all the state requirements for being a haunted home
school. We need your help to make our ordinary homeschool into
a haunted home school. Will you help?
History
Why, we'll start with collecting some rubbings
from tombstones. Be careful! Remember that is someone's loved
one under there! Place your rubbings over boxes or boards set
out in your front yard.
Learning
Comes Alive At The Cemetery On a cemetery visit, your
child will discover fascinating facts, perceive connections,
draw conclusions from comparing names and dates, and become more
comfortable with this most integral facet of human life and culture.
The
Real Prince Dracula Yes, there was a real Dracula,
and he was a true prince of darkness. He was Prince Vlad III
Dracula, also known as Vlad Tepes, meaning "Vlad the Impaler."
The Turks called him Kaziglu Bey, or "the Impaler Prince."
Read The
Legend of the Jack-O-Lantern and find out how Irish immigrants
brought this story to America. Perhaps make a skit of it and
act it out on Halloween!
Unwrap
a Mummy You are a famous archaeologist who specializes
in ancient mummies. You've been asked to study two very different
mummies: one from an Egyptian tomb and another from the Andes
Mountains in Peru. Use the clues provided by each mummy to decipher
who they were, how they died, and what their cultures were like.
Visit
a Haunted House! A directory of haunted houses in
the US and Canada. Some may be in historic buildings.
Visit a ghost town like this one in Bodie,
California, that I and a bunch of other homeschoolers enjoyed
one cool October day.
Drama
Next, with a little science and art mixed together, we'll
work on some special effects from Phantasmechanics.
Learn about imagineering, what folks like Disney and Spielberg
do to make objects seem to come alive.
What
makes a Halloween Costume Special? The Props!
These are great examples of how a Halloween costume is nothing
without a comical prop to assist it.
Turn your yard into a haunted house such as this one called
the Dragon's
Head Inn.
Plan a ghoulish party and invite all your friends to come
and get Goosebumps.
Home Economics
Cleaning your home in order to make it look neglected can
be great fun. Just throw sheets over everything. Now, go into
the kitchen and make some Gory
Goodies for your family, friends and neighbors. There's Drinks, Dips,
Snacks, & Appetizers, Breads,
Main Dishes,
Desserts and Other Good Ideas,
such as throwing a Halloween
Party.
Kraft has a witch cake recipe and some other spookie Halloween concoctions, too.
The Halloween
Costume Closet has lots of wonderful ideas for costumes and
Halloween decorations you or your parents can make with the help
of a little Velcro.
Science
Set up a mad scientist's laboratory, and invite the trick-or-treators
to watch in amazement as you perform a variety of glowing and
eerie tricks from Dr.
Grovenstein & Igor's Halloween Lecture Notes.
This is a good time of year to find skeletons
for part of a unit study on anatomy. How about studying the nature of
blood as well.
Have you observed how
your pet handles Halloween? Does he hide under the bed or
enjoy wearing a costume and helping out? Halloween can indeed
be a frightening experience for dogs, especially for puppies
who have never experienced this event, and for shy dogs who are
easily frightened.
Before you carve your pumpkin, have children guess
if a pumpkin will sink or float when out in a tub of water.
Have them justify their guesses. Put the pumpkin or pumpkins
in the tub. What happens? How do the children explain this? Does
this hold true for all pumpkins, or does it vary? Why?
Art
Crochet a Pumpkin Bag
This bag is 3 times the size of the smaller one. Whole Lotta candy can fit in it! A pattern by Libilou, one of our chat members, and homeschool mom.
Set up black lights around your house. Beneath the lights
"paint" some spooky pictures or things like "Boo!"
using liquid Tide. The stuff that makes Tide "whiter than
white" will also make it glow under black light. [Note:
Tide
may be effective in killing ants around your home when washed
off the walls.]
Carve
a simple
or really elegant
jack-o-lantern with these original
pumpkin carving patterns.
Grab our Spongebob
pumpkin carving pattern. Cut out the black parts.
Samhain
crafts
A teenaged Pagan homeschooler created this page with several
plans for Halloween decorations and links for even more ideas.
World Culture
Costumes need not be scary. Consider wearing the native
costume of a person from another country, perhaps those of
your ancestors or of a land where you might have a penpal or
want to travel to some day.
Careers
Dress up in the
uniform or usual attire of someone you aspire to become some
day.
Health
Pimple
Portal Offers Tips for Boo-tiful Skin!
While a dermatologist cannot help you choose a costume, he/she
can offer insight on how to avoid any scary skincare scenarios.
Sandy Swanson, M.D., a general and pediatric dermatologist from
North Carolina, offers some tips for trick-or-treaters on how
to keep your complexions clear this Halloween.
PE
Consider having a Run
Like Hell race with your friends, in costumes, around a local
cemetary. They really do this in Cincinnatti!
Literature
Years ago children used to sit by the radio and listen
to spooky stories on the Mercury
Theater. Today, you can download these old shows and listen
on your computer.
Another favorite series children love are the tales of
Narnia: The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe.
Older students will enjoy reading Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," which first
appeared in the United States Saturday Post (The Saturday
Evening Post) on August 19, 1843, serves as a reminder for all
of us. The capacity for violence and horror lies within each
of us, no matter how docile and humane our dispositions might
appear. - By Martha Womack. Another spooky favorite to read on
Halloween is "The
Tell-Tale Heart."
Too
Many Pumpkins, by Linda White, is the tale of Rebecca,
who was busy not eating pumpkins when--SPLAT--a giant pumpkin
fell off an overloaded truck and smashed into her yard. She buried
the mess so she wouldn't have to look at it, and, as you might
imagine, she witnessed a bumper crop the following fall. A good
fall story for those who wish to avoid the scarier aspects of
the season.
Read the Legend
of Sleepy Hallow, Washington Irving's classic American short
story.
Read some Ghost
stories and strange folktales of the American South, told
by the region's most celebrated storytellers along the moonlite
road.
Language Arts
Halloween
Jokes can help teach parts of speech and things like
homonyms and words with two meanings. Why didn't the skeleton
want to go to school? His heart wasn't in it.
Write a story about fall on this lined fall
paper for primary students or on this lined
stationery for older kids. Here's two other papers to choose
from: candy corn Halloween paper for beginners
and slightly
older kids.
Music and Sound Effects
Songs for Teaching - Halloween Songs
Buy the CD Tunes From The Crypt from Cincinnati's Classical Public Radio.
Consider some eerie music from our affiliate, Amazon.com:
- Halloween Bash
- Halloween
- Mannheim Steamrolle
- DJ's
Choice Scary Stories & Spooky Sounds
Math
Here's some Halloween
Worksheets, including many for math facts. You could create
similar puzzles for your child at their math level. Mrs. Fitzgerald
and Mrs. Taverna's classes created math
word problems. Give them a try and see if you can solve
them.
This Trick-or-Treating
Jigsaw Puzzle will help with spacial reasoning.
When you have collected all the candy you can, sort
the candy by brand and put in columns next to each other.
On graph paper, color one square in a column for each type. Label
the column. Does your graph of actual candy bars look like the
one using equal sized squares? Why doesn't it? Come up with a
guess (an hypothesis) about why one candy bar was favored by
your neighbors.
- The
Pumpkin Patch
- Pumpkins make everyone think of fall and fall holidays
like Halloween and Thanksgiving. But did you know that pumpkins
are healthy to eat? Do you know how long it takes a pumpkin to
grow? Did you know there are many different kinds of pumpkins?
Come into the Pumpkin Patch to learn more about pumpkins.
Estimate how many seeds are in your pumpkin. Put the first
handful of seeds in a 1/4 cup measuring cup. Count them. Put
these seeds and all the rest of the seeds in the biggest measuring
device you have in the kitchen. How many 1/4 cups of pumpkin
seeds is in that cup or bowl? Multiply the number of seeds in
the first measurement times the number of 1/4 cups in all. You
will have a pretty good estimate of the total number of seeds
your pumpkin had.
Activism
Donate half your candy to a worthy children's shelter or
shelter for battered women and their families.
Trick-or-Treat
for UNICEF and help the world's poorer children.
Why bother
to save Halloween?
Halloween is in trouble. Each year editorials in magazines and
newspapers and on television warn of dangers to children. And
each year more communities "ban" Halloween. So what?
Who needs it? What is Halloween anyway? By Richard Seltzer.
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How
to Do Tombstone Rubbings
It is a fairly easy and inexpensive hobby that is a wonderful
way to learn about history. There are some basic rules you should
follow and some tools you need to get started.
Phantasmechanics
If you love to decorate your home for Halloween, are involved
in an annual Haunted House, or simply have an interest in special
effects, you are in the right place.
Dr.
Grovenstein & Igor's Halloween Lecture Notes
My name is Dr. Grovenstein and I would like to welcome you to
my laboratory. Today, I would like to talk to you about one of
my favorite topics BURNING! (I love burning)
The
Big Bat Hunt
A WebQuest for 2nd Grade Reading and Science
Harry
Potter Glasses
Make your glasses to look like Harry's or use the pattern to
make up your own style.
Dracula's
Dinner
Capillaries are so tiny, red blood cells have to squeeze through
them single file. You can use bath beads and a few other supplies
to see how red blood cells fit through capillaries.
Halloween
Activities
Coloring pages, free pumpkin patterns, craft instructions, and
how to set up a classic apple dunk.
Halloween
Stencils
Ready-to-use stencils for painting or carving pumpkins or even
making a special holiday pizza!
Pumpkin Masters
Commercial site that will help you and your family create great
jack-o'-lanterns and wonderful Halloween traditions. With our
simple carving method you can produce the awesome pumpkins pictured
on this site and have fun doing it. Put away those unsafe knives
and start making pumpkin masterpieces!
Walt's
Pumpkin Carving Secrets
Pumpkins that are flat and don't roll work best. Look for pumpkins
with a sturdy stem, this is the sign of a healthy pumpkin.
Photographing
Pumpkins
Want to capture forever your best carving? Here's the trick to
getting a scary, bright photo of your jack-o-lantern.
Tips on Saving Your Carved Pumpkin
The best way to preserve your pumpkin is to take a Q-tip and
with it, Vaseline all the cut edges on the face that you've carved.
This will seal in a lot of the moisture, thus, slowing down the
dehydration.
Do
Black Cats Cause Bad Luck?
What is superstition? According to The Little Oxford Dictionary,
superstition is "belief in the existence or power of the
supernatural; irrational fear of the unknown; a religion or practice
based on such tendencies; widely held but wrong idea." Let
us examine that definition in depth. Mark Levin.
The Poe Decoder
An excellent site for helping teens understand this great American
author, what motivated him, and how to analyze his stories. Complete
copies of Poe's stories are online on this site.
Haunted
Hill is full of spooks... but how
many? and which kinds? We need your help to find out! Peek into
the window of each haunted house you come to.
Grade
2 - Integrated Lesson Plans
A set of nine lesson plans revolving around pumpkins.
Books to keep you learning
through Halloween
- Pumpkin Eye
by Denise Fleming
- All the glorious, spooky, swoopy delights
of Halloween congregate on one street for one perfectly bone-chilling
night.
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- Instant
Period Costume: How to Make Classic Costumes from Cast-Off Clothing
by Barb Rogers
- Included in this book are over 100
ingenious costume designs with photographs and diagrams for many
period characters from Egyptian, Greek and Roman all the way
to Punk. These conversion costuming ideas will save you time,
money and deadline disasters and give you precisely the costume
you want.
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Halloween
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