Candy Corn Quotes

My first grade book club has been reading The Candy Corn Contest, by Patricia Reilly Giff. It's a cute story about a fourth grade class that has a contest to see who can guess how many pieces of candy corn are in a jar. The main character in the story, Richard Best, is struggling with planning a sleepover for all the boys in his class, as well as trying to cover up the fact that he ate three pieces of candy corn out of the guessing jar.

I love this book, and I especially love reading it around Halloween because it means we get to eat a lot of candy corn! I always start the book club with some "behind the scenes" information about how candy corn is made. We watch a video (a clip from the show Unwrapped) and sample different flavors of candy corn. The kids love learning all of the different ingredients! We also have our own candy corn guessing jar. Every time the students take an AR test, they are allowed to come in my room and make a guess. Last week was a flurry of drama and controversy in first grade, as we learned that someone had been eating candy out of our jar! It was just like Richard in the book, only I promise I didn't plan it! Fifty pieces were missing, but don't worry--I had enough candy stashed away that the missing pieces were easily replaced.

Today we had a shorter book club meeting than usual, so I did a mini-lesson on quotation marks. I made a flipchart where the students could drag the quotation marks into the correct places in a sentence... but instead of quotation marks, we used candy corn! Here are a few screen shots from my flipchart:

The candy corn icon in the corner can be dragged to the correct place, and they automatically regenerate.

After everyone had had a turn at the Promethean board, I had each student write a Halloween-themed sentence using quotation marks correctly. They wrote the sentences on scrap paper, and once I had approved them, they were allowed to write their sentences in white crayon on black strips of paper. As a finishing touch, we glued candy corn where the quotation marks should go! They turned out pretty cute!