Spooky Stories for Halloween (and all year round)
It’s that time of the year again: the trees are showing off their autumnal colours, there’s a frosty bite in the morning air and the nights are drawing-in ever earlier. With this seasonal change comes the expectation of the annual Halloween celebrations. And this year, whether it be the consequences of months of social distancing or just the usual Primary English giddy excitement when we sniff a pumpkin-spiced opportunity to celebrate good books, I don’t know. But what I can tell you is that here at Primary English HQ we’ve been busy assembling some of the spookiest children’s books we know to help you and your class enjoy some ghoulishly good learning this Halloween. We have ghostly Guided Reading Packs, spooky sets of Starting Points and a wicked Whole Class Reading Sequence.
If you’re looking for ghostly Guided Reading Packs, we’ve three to get your KS1 children screaming with delight.
Meg and Mog which focusses on the key skill of recalling information from a text
Funnybones which encourages reading with fluency and making predictions
Winnie the Witch which again encourages children to make predictions
Our new Starting Points sets have been a real success. Each takes a high-quality text and provides you with text-based links to the National Curriculum to ensure that your grammar, reading and writing teaching is authentically linked to real text examples. We’ve got three scarily good sets to support teaching in KS1 and KS2
Room on the Broom: a modern classic enabling learning about the four sentence types and simple conjunctions.
Night of the Gargoyles: an edgy-looking picture book for older children that includes the use of hyphens and the infinitive form of verbs.
The Spider and the Fly: a cinematic interpretation of Mary Howitt’s famous narrative poem which includes opportunities to explore expanded noun phrases and modal verbs used for persuasion and the use of colons.
And last but not least, we have a wickedly good Whole Class Reading Sequence for Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Focussing on prediction and reading with fluency, this teaching sequence is perfect for use in KS2 and is sure to bring devilish delight to the children in your class.
So all that’s left to say is have a howlingly good Halloween.
The Primary English Team
If you liked the book suggestions in this article, take a look at this linked article Spooky Books for Halloween by our children’s book expert, Joy Court.