Halloween Story Time!

Happy Halloween! To celebrate Halloween today, I presented a special Halloween story time that both the children and I enjoyed.

To introduce this story, The Hallo-Wiener by Dav Pilkey, I asked the children in the group who were going trick or treating tonight to raise their hands. Then, I asked them to raise their hands if they were going in a costume. This story features Oscar, a dachshund who is made fun of because of his unusual shape and size. "Wiener Dog! Wiener Dog!" the other dogs call him to tease him. Oscar finds out that his mother has made a hot dog bun Halloween costume for him and he is so disappointed. However, he doesn't want to hurt his mother's feelings, so he decides to wear the costume. Oscar could not keep up with the other dogs as they ran off to go trick-or-treating because of his awkward costume. So there were no treats left for Oscar as he went from house to house. When trick or treating was over, the other dogs were scared of a huge monster with a jack-o-lantern head that rose out of a graveyard! Only Oscar could tell that the monster was just two cats in disguise. He tugged at the monster's outfit until it ripped and there were two cats! The cats ran off and the grateful dogs changed Oscar's nickname from "Wiener Dog" to "Hero Sandwich".

In Mouse's First Halloween by Lauren Thompson, Mouse is afraid of everything! Mouse and the readers go through the story together and find out that the following actually aren't that scary at all: swooping bats, tumbling leaves, a waving scarecrow, falling apples, scampering kittens, a glowing jack-o-lantern, and trick-or-treaters. The children enjoyed guessing what Mouse was afraid of and most of their guesses were correct!

In Minerva Louise on Halloween by Janet Morgan Stoeke, our favorite clueless and hapless chicken, Minerva, provides plenty of laughs again. Minerva doesn't know what Halloween is and can't figure out that the farmers are putting fake gravestones in the yard (not planting a garden); the farmer with a shovel is actually a skeleton on the door; why the pumpkins have been turned into jack-o-lanterns; why the laundry is on the farmers (the farmers are dressed as ghosts); and why candy corn is so sweet. The children enjoyed laughing with Minerva and explaining to me what was really happening in the story.