October language arts activities: have fun with your secondary students while still providing meaningful lessons.
As a teacher, you want students to enjoy the seasons. They are, after all, still kids.
As a teacher, you want to cover your lesson plans too. Hence, the balance.
Students love fall holidays, and I do too. Use that emotion to your advantage. Have classes write about the changing environment. Take them outside to experience glorious fall and work their vocabulary. Add real imagery to creative writing activities.
Fall lessons for language arts can be purposeful and part of your curriculum.
I find the second quarter of school to be a “sweet spot.” Students understand routines and procedures, but they aren’t tired yet. I personally still have energy and that excited spirt to create a memorable school year. Plus, I am excited for fall language arts activities, and my students are too.
What are the benefits of October language arts activities?
During October, I’ve found that incorporating the season into lessons helps with classroom management. The lessons don’t feel forced, and I find that the setting outside the window lends itself to my lessons inside my room. Here are October language arts activities.
Read fall-ish stories rich with symbolism.
Read a few spooky stories; reading Edgar Allan Poe is a part of my October curriculum. “The Masque of the Red Death” is my personal favorite, but know many teachers use “The Black Cat” too. Gothic horror stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” fit in nicely as well.
Specifically, I tie grammar to short stories or poems. “The Raven” is a perfect opportunity to study verbals, and “The Cask of Amontillado” works well with adjectives.
I know that not every school celebrates Halloween. If your community does not, fall is still the perfect time to implement First Chapter Friday books that are set during autumn like The Haunting of Hill House, Little Women, or The Catcher in the Rye. Perfect poem: “When the Frost is on the Punkin.”
Incorporating symbolic literature into October language arts activities can capture the season for your classes.
Give a how-to speech.
Encourage student excitement with a speech. What makes fall special? Many students realize that their reasons change over time. At one point, they liked Thanksgiving because holidays with gifts were next. As they become more mature, they enjoy the family and traditions of Thanksgiving more. Ask students to explain their family or community’s process for the seasons. Do they enjoy candy that comes with Halloween? Perhaps classes can share how to use leftover candy (freeze it for chopping up in cookies? share with neighbors?).
Often, a how-to speech focuses on preparing food. Switch up that expectation! Ask students to explain how to design Halloween costumes, how to practice for a certain sport, or how to balance work and school. A how-to speech doesn’t need to involve food, but it certainly can.
Teaching grammar: parts of a sentence.
One of my favorite ways to teach grammar is with coloring. A pumpkin or hot cocoa coloring activity is the perfect Halloween ELA activity.
With freshmen during October, I am often teaching parts of a sentence. During the first two months of school, I review parts of speech and connect the ideas with vocabulary. As I teach subjects, verbs, and on, I am building toward more advanced concepts like punctuation with phrases and clauses. We never stop using those terms as it is important to use domain-specific vocabulary.
I establish with my freshmen that we are working toward mastery of the English language and to do that, we might need to review concepts. Coloring sheets, especially on a Friday, are perfect.
Combining grammar and writing: common errors.
When I work with older students, we start the day with task cards. Older students have a foundation in grammar, and we can analyze writing errors such as:
☆ Incorrect punctuation choice: commas, semicolons, colons.
☆ Misplaced modifiers.
☆ Run-ons, comma splices, fragments.
☆ Incorrect verb tense, parallelism.
☆ Subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement.
Even though test-prep conjures sad practices, I’ve found that reviewing periodically with older students helps them prepare for upcoming standardized testing. Older students are ready to fix common errors because they have that foundation of language. Also, by this point in the school year, we are writing longer papers. Those errors have probably crept up.
ELA Goal setting.
October is the third month of school for me, and it is the perfect opportunity to refresh students goals. That one-pager is free, and you can use it to start discussions, conference with students, and communicate with parents. The newness of school maybe has worn off, and a refocus can help.
Plus, my October brings parent-teacher conferences. That free one-pager is the perfect tool to begin conversations with adults.
Halloween grammar fun.
Grammar coloring activities for specific seasons is a fun way to bring the season into the classroom. The Halloween grammar bundle allows you to:
- Practice different skills with different students. For instance, if a few students struggle to manipulate vocabulary (a verb to a noun), you might review parts of speech. Practice skills like sentence structure, verb moods, and verb voice while covering.
- When classes get to choose what they practice, they have increased ownership of their work.
- Decorate your room with finished products! Even older kiddos appreciate seeing their work.
Halloween grammar coloring activities also make the perfect school activity on days in which students would rather be celebrating.
Riddles, unreliable narrators, difficult comprehension: Poe?
Yes, Poe brings an assortment of fun challenges to English language arts. His stories often prove difficult for all students to comprehend, but (and this is big!), middle school and high school students enjoy him. They like his riddles, his spooky descriptions, his odd narrators, everything.
For us, that means we can dive into difficult stories by practicing close reading. We can also work on literary analysis by looking at his language and its influence on his message.
Poe neatly fits into October language arts activities with fun results.
Write every day.
A goal of mine with older students is for them to write daily. They don’t always write a long paper, but they write a response on a sticky note, write a sentence as an exit ticket, or write a quick-response.
When I don’t have students write daily, they fall out of habit. I find that I spend more time reviewing writing instead of moving on with new concepts. Practice makes perfect, and that cliche applies to writing every day.
Since we are well into the school year, daily writing does not seem like a chore but rather, like a community builder.
Dive into literature.
October language arts activities probably include literature. Sprinkle some newish activities into your lessons.
You can ask students to create infographics for literature, or you can use pre-made ones. Students love infographics because they are modern, and students see them on social media. I do use infographics as an evaluation tool, but I also use them to gather data.
When students create infographics, they are forced to choose what information goes on that image. We can see what students eliminate (and might not understand) and where students have incorrect information (and what we need to review).
Finally, gather the infographics together to use as a class teaching tool. Putting them on display is a bonus.
Organize the library.
I don’t start the school year with every bit of my room polished. Actually, we start with a fairly blank room and add class work as we continue.
With my classroom library, I set out books at the start of the year, but I don’t organize until students have chosen their first books. Again, we might not rearrange the library shelves (sometimes by genre, sometimes by color) until about October. This method lowers my anxiety, and my young readers are invested in the process..
October language arts activities can meet standards while acknowledging the excitement that students still feel. Since I’ve taught, schools are increasingly strict about no costumes and communities are discouraging older kids from trick-or-treating. Being a teenager can be tough, and I like to acknowledge the seasons and excitement with my students. Fall language arts activities help.
Ready to read ahead? I have more language arts activities for November too.
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