In Boerum Hill, book characters instead of goblins for Halloween

It’s Halloween today, so it’s no surprise that kids at PS 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, arrived at school in costume. But there were no witches, goblins, or ghosts. Instead, for PS 261’s first-ever Storybook Character Parade, the kids dressed as characters from their favorite books.

Librarian Danielle Taylor Brocco dressed as Alice the Fairy.

There were Harry Potters galore, and an entire class of second graders wore handmade hats that turned them into mice from an award-winning series of books by Kevin Henkes, whose work the grade studied in detail this year. Outside the school doors, parents with cameras snapped shots of their children and a father dressed as Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat serenaded the parading students.

The event was organized by PTA member Kim Wiley-Schwartz. (Wiley-Schwartz works for the Livable Streets Network, which like GothamSchools is an initiative of The Open Planning Project.)

At PS 261, the Storybook Character Parade is likely to become an annual tradition: As the children returned to their classrooms, parents huddled on the sidewalk outside the school discussing plans for next year’s parade.