Week 4: Celebrating creatively

Halloween is a fun time of the year and a great opportunity to show your creativity while developing connections with others.

Jack

Mr. Evil Cheese Scientist via Compfight

Feel free to adapt these activities to any other celebration, festival or event that is held in your country, state or town.  It doesn’t have to be Halloween.

Activity 1: Dress up your blog for Halloween

Events like Halloween and Christmas are ideal for dressing up your blog.

Here’s some ideas on how to dress up your blog:

  • Add a Halloween picture to your header or background.  You’ll find lots of great Halloween images that are free to use on Pixabay.  For help, refer to uploading a custom header and uploading a custom background.
  • Add an animated gif to your background.  You’ll find some free animated gifs on FG.A.com
  • Add some fun Halloween Widgets.  You’ll find a list of cool Halloween widgets on Homeschool Towers Spice up your blog for Halloween post and lots of other ideas on how to make over  your blog for Halloween!  The instructions on how to add a text widget show how to add a widget using embed code.
  • Change to a Halloween Style theme.  The theme Monster on Edublogs was originally designed for Halloween.

Once you’ve dressed up your blog write a post explaining where you found all the headers, images, widgets and tell your readers why you choose each one.

Activity 2:  Write some poetry or spooky story about Halloween.

Write a poem or a spooky story about Halloween and remember to include some images to show what you learnt from last week’s challenge on using images.

Activity 3:  Write a post about how you celebrate Halloween or the History of Halloween. 

Halloween is celebrated in lots of different ways around the World.  Read If Only Best Birds Sang ‘Halloween traditions with photographs‘ post to learn how they celebrate Halloween in Ireland.

Now write a post to tell us how you celebrate Halloween where you live or write a post on the History of Halloween.

Activity 4:  Show off your Halloween creativity using some different tools such as powtoon, thinglink, padlet, glogster, soundcloud, poll daddy and embed them into a post.

There are many cool interactive tools that you can embed into post that create opportunities to grab attention and engage readers in ways that aren’t achievable using text and images.  You’ll find examples of popular tools that you can embed here.

Now choose one (or more of these tools) to show off your Halloween creativity and write a post that includes your embed tool.  Classes – you could get students to work in groups using a different tool.

Still got more time?

  1. Visit other blogs either class or student – choose bloggers from other countries, maybe you will start getting some dots on your clustrmap or some flags on your widget.
  2. Check out the magazine on the sidebar – are you featured in there yet?
  3. Also check out the One World Our World magazine – this is where I am flipping the Raise Your Voice posts
  4. Leave a comment on a challenge blog post linking back to your post so Miss W can visit and leave you a comment.

Miss W visiting your blogs

Starting this week, I will only be visiting blogs where students or classes have left the post URL in a comment with an explanation of why you chose that activity.

If your teacher is moderating your posts, you will need to wait until it has been published before giving me your URL.

Check out the difference between a blog URL and a post URL.

Blog URL: https://studentchallenge.edublogs.org

Post URL : https://studentchallenge.edublogs.org/2015/10/10/raise-your-voice/

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

There will be a special admin post this week, so please make sure you read it. It will affect mentors, students and classes.