Activity:
Before and After Halloween Acrostic
Acrostic poems may be simple and seem easy, but this version invites kids to pick a fun Halloween word like GHOST or JACK-O’-LANTERN and explore their word skills. An acrostic poem uses the letters of a word to start each line. If your word is ghost, the first line will start with G, the second with H, the third with O, the fourth with S, and the final line with T. Start by writing an acrostic poem, but then get ready for a writing challenge that makes an acrostic trickier to write.
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What You Need:
- Paper
- Pen or pencil
- Scrap Paper
What You Do:
- Ask your child to write a list of Halloween words. If she can’t think of anything, suggest a few of these words: bats, candy, cats, frighten, ghosts, goblin, haunted, Jack-o’-lantern, monster, moon, skeleton or witch.
- Which of these words does your child think would make a good acrostic? Once she has made her choice, help her brainstorm a list of words that have to do with her chosen word. For ghost, she might list ghoulish, spooky, hopeless, and floating. Although she might not use all of these words in her poem, working on the list will help her think spooky thoughts, and even practice her vocabulary and synonyms.
- Can she choose words from this second list to begin the lines in her poem? If none of them will work, brainstorm words that begin with the necessary letters.
- It’s time to write the acrostic. Don’t be surprised if it takes several tries to get each line written.
- Now that she has an acrostic poem, it’s time for the real challenge. She has to write a second poem ending with the letters in her word. For Ghost this means that the first line ends in G, the second in H, the third in O, the fourth in S and the last in T.
- Before she tries to write this second poem, brainstorm words that end with each letter. This can be hard and a Scrabble Word Finder (http://www.wordfind.com/ends-with/) can help with this step. It lists words by last letter.
- Once she has developed a list, it’s time to write the second poem. Again, it may take several tries to come up with a good line for each letter.
When she is done, have her write the paired poems out to share it with her family.
