October 1, 2014

Halloween Book Activity: Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance

My kids love doing activities with books, so we decided to do some fun Halloween Monster Activities with a favorite Halloween book. 








One of our favorite Halloween books is "Frank Was a Monster who Wanted to Dance" by Keith Graves. It's a short, quick, silly read.  In this book, our monster friend Frank decides to follow his dream to be a dancer, but after parts of his body start falling off as he dances, the audience leaves. Frank doesn't let that stop him though and continues to boogie.


One of the first body parts Frank loses is his eyeball, so we decided to play some eyeball games!

First, we turned some ping pong balls into eyeballs with markers. We used permanent markers, but I closely supervised them. You could also just make them yourself. While we made them, we talked about the parts of the eye and what each one was for. Art- check. Science - check.



Then we tried bouncing them into pumpkins. The boys loved this game. We gave each pumpkin a different point value and then added up points to see who won. So, ya know, math.



Frank also loses an arm. We figured an arm would make a good golf club. The boys traced around their hands, colored them in, cut them out, and taped them on to wooden utensils to make our arm golf clubs. We also looked at a picture online of a skeleton arm and hand and marveled at all the little bones that are in our hands. Developing fine motor skills - check!



Christopher made a simple golf hole for them to try and hit the ball in. We counted how many tries it took for them to get the ball in hole. 



The boys decided it would also be fun to play a game of basket"eye"ball. Nathan would hold the bucket and Christopher would try to throw the eyeballs in. Nathan tried to hold it really high to make it hard.

hey! get down from there! (but not until after I take a picture)


Since Frank likes dancing so much, we decided we should give it a try. One of my kids' favorite songs to dance to at Halloween is "Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. It's part of the Peer Gynt Suite. 

In the beginning, the music is very quiet. We like to pretend we are tiptoeing around a cave where there are sleeping trolls. 

It starts to get louder, and we start moving faster. 

When it gets really loud and fast, we must have accidentally awakened the troll king!! All the trolls are chasing us and the kids are dancing (ie. running around) like crazy. 

We ended our fun with some deliciously monstrous snacks - Eyeballs made from powdered donut holes, gummi life savers and chocolate chips. Yum!





We had a fun book activity and the boys are already planning another for next week! It's a good thing we have all these activities from other bloggers to choose from:



This post is part of an AWESOME Halloween Read and Play Blog Hop.  Make sure to check out the other book based activities from fantastic bloggers!

Preschool Powol Packets- Room on the Broom- Croaking Frog Craft
Betsy's Photography- Popcorn- Making Popcorn Bars
Where Imagination Grows- 5 Little Ghosts- Ghost Collages
Rubberboots and Elf Shoes- Skeleton Hiccups- Paper Chain Skeleton
Little Bins For Little Hands- ABCs of Halloween- Sensory Bin
Line Upon Line Learning- The Spooky Old Tree- Prepositions Game
Wise Owl Factory- Bunnicula and others- Halloween Book Fun Learning Round Up
Planet Smarty Pants- The Picky Little Witch- Halloween Cupcakes
Study at Home Mama- 10 Halloween Books and 50 Activities

Don't forget to check out the Halloween Read and Play Pinterest Board which features ALL these great activities!

12 comments:

  1. Bouncing eyeballs - now that's a fun game! I love your caption "hey! get down from there! (but not until after I take a picture)" because I do that too! lol!

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    1. haha. yes. Sometimes we must get that snapshot first! ;)

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  2. Great ideas! Maybe I'll use some for my kindergarten classroom! You're so fun.

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    1. Thanks! The boys had lots of fun with it. I bet your kindergarteners would love it!

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  3. This looks like a lot of fun. And your boys remind me of my boys. We ALWAYS have to tell our boys to treat the furniture like furniture and not like playground equipment. We will have to do some of these activities for Halloween this month. Thanks for the great post!

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    1. Thanks Deborah! Our boys definitely think our furniture is for climbing/jumping etc . . . If only there was an easy fix for that . . . Thanks for commenting!

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  4. What a fun book! The illustrations look amazing!

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    1. It is a fun book! And it's a short read which is great too! :) sometimes I just don't have the energy for a long story. Thanks for commenting!

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  5. Another fun book is great to know about! I used to teach a song about a flower named Frank, and this would be perfect with the song. This is engaging for the children and sure to be remembered. Thanks!

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    1. A flower named Frank? Sounds like a fun song! Glad you enjoyed the post!

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