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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Which Witch?

I may be the only teacher in the whole world who genuinely loves Halloween.

I'm at least in the minority, grouped together with a bunch of other first and second-year teachers who haven't been teaching long enough to hate this day of glorified sugar rushes and approximately zero education, but I really love it! I love the costumes, and I love dancing the Monster Mash, and I love making witch's brew.

Before we started putting the food together, I like to sing "Witch's Brew" by Hap Palmer with my class. They love it and so do I! What do you think the cap is on who would enjoy this song? 4th grade? Maybe 5th? I mean I still like it, but I am kind of a 2nd grader at heart :)

I thought it would be fun to wear a witch hat while making the witch's brew, but since I didn't have one, I just made one out of construction paper when I got to school. And then, since that turned out to be so easy, I cut some paper for my kids to make their own!

The hats are made with one piece of construction paper, cut in half. I put out 4 colors so they could mix and match and choose a half-sheet of orange and a half-sheet of green, or whatever they wanted. 
I gave two stencils to each table. They needed to cut a circular hole in the center of one of the half-sheets of construction paper, and a bit of a slope on the other half-sheet. 

The hardest part was folding the slope-cut half-sheet into a party hat shape, and honestly, I ended up doing almost all of them. I stapled them twice, and it actually didn't take too long.  
How cute are my kids! Ah.
I gave everyone a few minutes to decorate their hats, by coloring them or cutting a special design into the brim.  
They were definitely not the sturdiest of hats, but they were cute, and it was a fun addition to our witches brew activity!

There are a ton of recipes smattered all over the internet, but the one I used this year is one I got from a teacher on my team. It called for

-cinnamon red hots
-Cheerios
-gummy worms
-Chex cereal (plain)
-candy corn
-sunflower seeds
-M&M's
-Skittles
-raisins
-marshmallows
-pretzels
-Fritos
-Bugles

So, kind of a lot of ingredients. What I liked about it, though, is that everything coordinated really cutely to something else! The cinnamon red hots were drops of blood, the Cheerios were cat eyes, the gummy worms were earth worms....etc. Not only that, but I have a few allergies in my class and nothing on this list was a problem for any of my allergy kids.

This year, I asked parents to send everything in on the day we made witch's brew in class. Next year, I think I will ask for everything to be sent in a day or two before we make witch's brew. I want to take it out of the original packaging and put them in bags, bottles, or boxes with labels. I found so many cute ones on this Pinterest board, but it was after I had already done it with my class. Some of them are printables, some cost money, and some are editable. I'm sure there's something on there that will meet your needs!


I was the only one who mixed the witch's brew, and I separated them into individual baggies for my kiddos to snack on during seat-work. 

We do this worksheet along with our activity, which I got for free on TPT from the lovely Shelley Gray. This worksheet is perfect for reviewing sequencing, and the pictures on it are so cute! It doesn't exactly match up to the recipe I used, so I just let my kids put the ingredients in whatever order they wanted.
We ended up having several extra baggies, so we were able to share our witch's brew with some of the other teachers and our cute office ladies. Do you make witch's brew in your classroom? What do you do to make it fun?

Happy Halloween everyone!

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