Get ready to spookify your classroom with these spooktacular Halloween classroom activities! Halloween is the perfect time to engage and delight your students with exciting educational experiences. You can use the theme and excitement of Halloween to get your students to really work on complex reading skills.
Benefits of Incorporating Halloween Activities in the Classroom
Halloween is a great time to really push children academically. They are into the rhythm of school, they have learned some things, and they are so excited about the upcoming holiday season. So, use that!! Give children themed activities that make them think critically and work hard academically, but the best part is they won’t even notice they are working hard because it will seem like fun to them!
Halloween Classroom Activities Writing Style
There are so many fun Halloween classroom activities that revolve around writing.
- Scary Story Writing- Have students write a scary story! Teach them about the elements that you see in scary stories, read a few scary kids stories, and have them write! They will get so creative in this exercise that it is a great time to work on different mechanics that you need your students to work on. Focus on sentence structure or detailed story telling!
- Descriptive Monsters– Have students draw and design a monster of their choice. Then, have them write a descriptive piece that describes their monster. You could read the pieces out loud and students can figure out whose monster belongs to who by their description or you can partner them up and have them try and draw each other’s monsters using the description.
Math Halloween Classroom Activities
For math you can do so many easy and creative things, depending on what skills you are working on at the time.
- Monster Week- In this unit, there are activities that focus on word problems and math facts.
- Write the spooky word problem– have students write a word problem that is spooky. Go over how to make sure your reader is adding/subtracting and then have the other students solve the problem.
- Candy Math– you can use Halloween candy for pretty much anything. Have students show multiplication problems using their Halloween candy, have them graph everyone’s favorite candy, have them create different shapes using the candy. The possibilities are endless!
Reading Halloween Classroom Activities
Reading is the perfect place to add a Halloween theme! All you have to do is make what they are reading about Halloween focused and they will work on any skill that you want them to. Here is a few ideas on things you could do during reading time that are Halloween classroom activities!
- Bat Cave Challenge– arguably my favorite Halloween activity is the bat cave challenge. Students learn that their teacher is an injured bat and they have to earn their bat wings and save their teacher. They do this by completing rigorous reading activities.
- Visualizing with “I Need My Monster” – Read this story, but don’t show the students the pictures. As you read through the story, the students will draw what they think the monster “Gabe” looks like. Then, at the end you will go back through the story and see if their visualizations were correct or not.
- Monster Week– In this unit, you will do activities that focus on inference, close reading, visualization, and more!
- EPIC– Have students pick a book and read it from this EPIC collection. Then, have them work on whatever skill they are learning at the time. They could identify the main idea, summarize what they read, create questions, or create a play to retell the story!
- Reading Center Freebie– sign up here to grab Halloween digital reading centers for free!
Books to Read for Halloween
Reading great literature is a great way to add Halloween fun into your normal day! Read a great Halloween themed chapter book while reading aloud, or work on reading skills with a great picture book! Click on the books below to head to some of my favorites!
Ways to Add Halloween into Your Daily Schedule
- Halloween Brain Breaks are a great way to add Halloween into your daily schedule. Use some of the ones below!
- Halloween morning meeting– if you are using a morning meeting time in your day, play games that are Halloween themed, do greetings that are spooky or sound like bats, etc. You can grab the whole year here to have that ready to go for you!
- Halloween transitions- when students are transitioning from one subject to another, challenging them to do so by acting like a Halloween character. Ex: “Get your notebooks from your cubby, but fly like a bat to get there”
- Halloween music- when students are writing or doing silent work play some Halloween songs in the background!
I hope some of these ideas show up in your classroom this year! If you want more Halloween content, click the button below!
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!