Fall and Halloween-themed picture books offer a fantastic opportunity to engage young readers while reinforcing important reading comprehension skills. In this post, 8 Amazing Fall Picture Books with Activities: Plus Freebies, I’ve put together ten fun fall themed children’s books that are perfect for teaching reading comprehension skills, along with ideas for phonics, phonemic awareness, and math activities for each book. These resources are a treat and sure to make your October SPOOKtacular! Plus, I’ve linked 2 FREE sets of graphic organizers in this post that you and your kiddos will love using with these books.
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1. “The Biggest Pumpkin Ever” by Steven Kroll
Skills: Summarizing and predicting
Activity Ideas: Have students summarize the story’s key events and predict what might happen next with the enormous pumpkins
2. “Room on the Broom” by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Skills: Character traits, problem-solving, sequencing, rhyming words.
Activity Ideas: Discuss the characters’ traits and how they interact. Have students sequence and retell important events. Have children discuss and write about the problem and solution in the story. Pick out rhyming words from the story for children to practice and play games with.
3. “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat” by Lucille Colandro
Skills: Sequencing, retelling, and phonemic awareness
Activity Ideas: Ask students to sequence the story’s events and retell what happened. For younger learners, pull words from the book like bat, goblin, ghost, cat, owl, and have children generate rhyming words, match beginning sounds, etc.
4. “Stellaluna” by Janell Cannon
Skills: Comparing and contrasting characters
Activity Ideas: Compare Stellaluna with the other bat characters. Discuss how she is different and similar to her bird friends.
5. “How to Catch a Witch”
Skills: Sequencing, retelling, how-to writing, STEM
Activity Ideas: Have children retell or order the sequence of events in the story. They could also complete a writing activity like this one where they create a plan for How to Catch a Witch. Allow them to build and test their witch trap as a fun STEM activity!
6. “The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree” by Stan and Jan Berenstain
Skills: Prepositions, phonics, and phonemic awareness (rhyming words).
Activity Ideas: Have children help you identify prepositional words as you read the story and complete a game or activity with them after reading.
You could also have them identify rhyming words in the book. Create lists of rhyming words for each character’s adventure and play a rhyming word matching game to reinforce the skill.
7. “The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin” by Joe Troiano
Skills: Character traits and comparing with other characters.
Activity Ideas: Discuss Spookley’s character traits and compare them to the round pumpkins in the story.
8. “The Hallo-Wiener” by Dav Pilkey
Skills: Character traits, problem/solution, and empathy
Activity Ideas: Analyze the main character’s traits and discuss how he feels throughout the story. Encourage empathy and kindness.
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Which Books and Activities Will You Use?
These fall and Halloween-themed picture books are not only enjoyable for students but also offer valuable opportunities to strengthen their early literacy and reading comprehension skills. Incorporate these activities into your lessons to make this month a time of learning and fun.
Grab your FREE graphic organizers below! Don’t worry! If you’re already a newsletter member, this won’t cause you to get duplicate emails from me! 🙂
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy:
- Spreading Staff Cheer in October: How to Play “You’ve Been Booed”
- “How to Catch a Monster” Classroom Activities
Happy October!
Megan