Costumes, Candy and Books!

Halloween will be here in two weeks, and kids everywhere are overly excited.  It was never my thing.  The scariest costume I ever wore was Peter Pan – I carried a sword.  On the other hand, my students always seem surprised that school is not canceled for Halloween.  For kids it is a very real holiday, and it makes them want to read scary books.  My favorite elementary school librarian told me that a fourth grader asked for a scary book on Friday, and she suggested Acid Rain (a chilling topic).  We try to keep things tame in elementary school, and I've never liked horror as a genre, but kids do.  So I try to make an exception for Halloween.

For little kids, Halloween is a great time for counting books.  Perhaps publishers see it as practice for candy counting.  Any of the many versions of Five Little Pumpkins are good choices, and my niece has the sequel, Five Little Ghosts.  Both are rhyming books that count backwards from five. There’s also Halloween 123s by Patti Reeder Eubank and Too Many Monsters by Robert Neubecker.  Both books count up to ten.  For our middle readers, all of our favorite characters have a Halloween book.  Biscuit, Arthur, Franklin, and Amelia Bedelia all celebrate this scariest of holidays, as do Fancy Nancy, Junie B., Cam Jansen and Jigsaw Jones.  For readers who want something creepier, Marion Dane Bauer has a series of ghost stories that are geared towards second and third graders. 

   

At a time when vampires, werewolves and witches are everyday fare, our big kids want really terrifying Halloween books.  There are plenty of titles that will give them the shivers without, exposing them to the mature themes of young adult novels.  The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is about a boy who is raised by ghosts.  It’s an unsettling story, but well written and clever.  My students are fans of Mary Downing Hahn, whose ghost stories provide the necessary chills, and I love Chris VanAllsburg’s The Stranger and The Widow’s Broom.  The first is about a mysterious stranger whose presence at a farm seems to keep winter from coming.  The latter is the story of a witch’s discarded broom, and it’s unending and unnerving usefulness.  Roald Dahl’s The Witches was always my October read aloud, because few things are more frightening than a group of witches plotting to turn children into mice.  As we busily gather costume accessories and candy over the next two weeks, take some time to share a good book.  Happy Halloween!

 

Halloween Books

Five Little Pumpkins by Dan Yaccarino

Five Little Pumpkins by Iris Van Rynbach

Five Little Pumpkins by Ben Mantle

Five Little Ghosts by William Boniface

Halloween 123s by Patti Reeder Eubank

Too Many Monsters by Robert Neubecker

Happy Halloween, Biscuit by Alyssa Satin Capucilli

Arthur’s Halloween by Marc Brown

Franklin’s Halloween by Paulette Bourgeois

Happy Haunting, Amelia Bedelia by Herman Parish

Fancy Nancy: Halloween . . .or Bust! by Jane O’Connor

Junie B., First Grader: Boo . . . And I Mean It! by Barbara Park

Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House by David A. Adler

Jigsaw Jones and the Case of the Groaning Ghost by James Preller

The Blue Ghost by Marion Dane Bauer

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn

The Stranger by Chris VanAllsburg

The Widow’s Broom by Chris VanAllsburg

The Witches by Roald Dahl