All Hallow's Read free spooky poem books

Last year I was inspired by Sarah Richardson's free foldable book of "The Raven" to make some books of spooky poems for my students.  My students enjoyed folding the sheets to make their own zines, and they were a great Halloween giveaway for the library.  If anyone else wants to make these to give away, I've included the images and pdfs of the mini books below (the pdfs are slightly better quality for printing.)  Please print them out and share them with anyone you would like. I love any excuse to spread poetry around!

The first one is "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes

Highwayman mini book from ebretall

The second one is a collection of three short poems: "Hist Whist" by E. E. Cummings, "The Fairies" by William Allingham, and the traditional ballad "Old William's Ghost"  

Fairies. Witches, and Ghosts mini book from ebretall

You can find instructions on how to fold the books here

For more information on All Hallow's Read, visit their website or watch the video below:

Mystery Book Game

My coworker and I noticed that some of the reviews our students were posting on Destiny Quest left something to be desired.  They mostly just praised the book using words with many extra letters and even more punctuation marks.  So we came up with the idea of challenging them to describe a book without using character or place names.  We then collected the slips and read them out loud to the class to see if they could guess the title.  We originally tried it with 5th graders, but they had so much fun we decided to play the game with our 3rd and 4th graders too.  I then typed the descriptions up and put them in a slideshow to display in the library so that others can play along as well.  I've included it below.

Mystery book game

View more presentations from ebretall

Book Masks

I tried a new activity with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students in my library last week and they really enjoyed it.  I call it book masks and it was inspired by an advertising campaign I saw online with people's heads in books arranged in such a way that the cover image seemed to extend to the person reading the book.

The first step is the hardest: find some books where the cover had  a large head on it.  Unfortunately this isn't a subject heading so to find them we mostly went to sections that would be popular like pets and browsed through the books until we found some that worked.  We found the face to face series very helpful.  Then find an "I am" poem template on line that you like.  There are a lot to choose from.  We ended up modifying one so that it would be age-appropriate and short enough to be able to do in a thirty minute class period.  Then we did some examples to show the kids what we were talking about, I like that the way I posed gives the green knight has a cute braided bun.




Then we made a template with the prompt for each line and enough space for the kids to write their poems in.  Before each class came in we arranged the books facing up around the edge of the room so that they could choose one.  Then we introduced the activity to them, showed them the examples, handed out the templates and let them go wild.  When they finished their poems they brought it up to us and we took their picture.  I think they showed a lot of creativity in their poems and I found it interesting seeing what they thought others would wonder, hope, etc. The best part was that if they got stuck writing the poem the mask was a book so they could open it up and read it to find out more about their creature and get inspiration.  Some of the kids even made multiple poems and asked to take some templates home so they could do more.  It was a great activity for Halloween when they were all antsy and I think I'll do it again next year.  I've included examples of the student poems below:

Book Spine Poetry

Over at 100 Scope Notes the count down to National Poetry Month has begun with an accompanying request for book spine poems.  I posted some poems I made last year along with some made by my students, so this time I decided to challenge myself by using a more limited pool.  For these poems I used only books that I own. Furthermore the first poem was made entirely from books that I have read and enjoyed while the second was made from my tbr shelf (which had a worryingly large number of titles to choose from).  It seems that I'm just as long-winded with my poems as I am in the rest of my life, so they both ended up being epic poems telling a story.

First we have an adventure story exuding confidence, befitting all the journeys the books on my 'read' shelf have taken me on and all the love and attention I have given them:

Next we have a tale of longing justly reprimanding me for my neglect from the books on my tbr shelf:

Hey, I've been busy.  I'm working full time and going to grad school and I have to focus on reading books I can recommend to kids for now.  Cut me some slack, I'll get around to you when I can!  Jeesh, those tbr books can be a bit pushy sometimes.

So what are your shelves trying to tell you?