Halloween can be a crazy time at school, but you can also use all that crazy energy to create meaningful academic Halloween activities for your students. Halloween activities for school can be both engaging and rigorous at the same time! Check out these engaging activities that will also challenge your students academically.
The Best Halloween Activities for School: Themed Weeks
Themed weeks are a great Halloween activity for school. Basically, you pick a theme and all week long you do activities around that theme. It keeps your students engaged and you can be creative in how you mix the content into the theme.
Bat Week – Grab FREE bat week plans here!
Monster Week – Kids love monsters and there are so many great ways to incorporate monsters into your lessons. Just like my favorite read aloud, “I Need My Monster”. You can read it without the pictures and have the students visualize what Gabe looks like. Then, discuss how visualizing and inferencing got them to the monster. Grab more ideas here!
Fun Halloween Writing
When you have a holiday theme, students write more in depth writing pieces. A good holiday means great writing!
Pumpkin Freebie
This FREE Pumpkin writing activity has students focus on descriptive writing. They create a pumpkin and write a descriptive piece explaining their pumpkin. Then, a partner has to read their piece and attempt to create the same pumpkin without looking at their partner’s pumpkin drawing!
Scary Story Writing
There is nothing better than a good scary story! Kids LOVE this activity. They get so creative and love reading their scary stories to each other. Grab it here!
Halloween Read Alouds
Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds
This fun story is about a rabbit who loves to eat carrots until one day, the carrots begin to follow him!
The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons
This is a nonfiction book with information about pumpkin growth cycles, how to plant pumpkins and the history of carving jack o’lanterns.
The Good, The Bad, and The Spooky by Jory John
This story is based on the picture book, The Bad Seed. When the Bad Seed cannot find a Halloween costume, his only option is to postpone Halloween for everyone. Kiddos excitedly wait to hear if the Bad Seed will return to his bad ways or not.
It’s Halloween, I’m Turning Green by Dan Gutman
This short chapter book from the My Weird School series is a great read aloud during October that will have the kids laughing out loud!
Crankenstein Trick or Treat by Samantha Berger
This follow up book to Crankenstein explains what happens when Crankenstein’s favorite day of the year, Halloween, gets ruined.
Want more ideas? Check out these ideas for the entire month of October!
Hannah Wilde
I am so glad you’re here! I love helping 3rd-5th grade teachers by providing ideas, engaging resources, and professional development they need. I am a literacy coach who is here to help lessen the workload for teachers while making them more confident! I want students to be continually engaged in a rigorous environment!