DVD Recommendation: Halloween

I love the Scholastic Video Collection dvds. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, they are children's books made into cartoons and placed on dvds with multiple stories in a single dvd. Some of them are on a specific topic, some highlight an author, but each has a good selection of children's stories.

At the first of October I always take out my copy of Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman...and 4 More Spine-Tingling Tales.

 This DVD has four stories on it plus one bonus story for a total of 5 stories and is a total 55 minutes in length. Since there are five different stories this is a great dvd to put for a little treat to watch either one at a time (for about a 10 minute story) or watch the entire 55 minutes at once. The cover story, Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman, is the story of three brothers who wonder off into the woods and stumble upon a witch's house and end up staying the night. The narrator of the story has the voice of an elderly woman and the voice of the witch is a bit chilling. In fact when my daughter was 5 she was a bit scared of this particular movie, but now that she is 6 she seems to really enjoy it.

Another favorite of mine on this dvd is: The Witch in the Cherry Tree. This is the story of a witch who wants to go into a little boy's house to eat cakes. However, the boy and his mother won't invite her in so she does things outside to try to get him to let her eat some of his homemade cakes. It is a cute story that will appeal to many children.

One of the other lovely things about the Scholastic Video Collection in either your home or classroom is that in addition to watching the stories on t.v. you can then read the stories to the children and there is something about seeing the book of the movie that appeals to children. One sequence I have used in my classroom and can be done at home as well is to 1. Read the book to the children, 2. Do a language arts activity with the book, 3. Watch the dvd of the book, 4. Do an art activity with the story, and 5. Re-read the book. In some instances I may spend an entire week on a story and also have a variety of centers based on the stories in my classroom. If you are at home, centers could look be a small activity done each day so by the end of the week they have done 5 activities with the story. I wouldn't do all 5 steps with every story, but those books that children really love, the kind children can't seem to get enough of, I always do so that they get their fill of the story. In future posts I will give specific examples of activities to do with different books for home and the classroom.

*I apologize for some of the above links. Some of the books are older books and you may need to either check them out from your local library or purchase a used copy. Also some of the used copies on Amazon are showing up at very high prices so do a little looking around on Amazon. I was able to find each of them listed separately for under $10.*

Happy Spine-Tingling!!!