Halloween Scrapbook Pages

It seems like this time of year I add quite a bit to my kids' scrapbooks. During October we go to the pumpkin patch on a field trip and we have a ton of fun and take lots of pictures and I make a field trip scrapbook page.

To add to that we also do monster writing. I love working on descriptive writing because my kids really need help making their stories more interesting.  Monsters make it easy because they get to use their imagination. The first thing we do is draw monsters. My kids are much more into art this year so their drawings were spectacular and every kid had their own brand of creativity. Once we drew our monsters, we practiced brainstorming and we spent a ton of time talking about adjectives. Then they wrote paragraphs describing their monsters.  We got these up in time for conferences so our parents could see them.  The kids loved showing them off.

We also include our first publisher project in our scrapbook.  Most of my kids are great with technology, but in third grade they haven't really worked with any word or computer programs designed specifically for publishing.  In October my kids get a crash course in text boxes, fill color, lines, clip art, fonts, and typing skills. We do all of this in Microsoft Publisher and the kids get so excited.  It takes a lot of convincing to get them to focus on the writing and not all the extras.  Ok so that doesn't really happen in real life because who doesn't love clip art, but a teacher has to try.