Halloween is a crazy day for many teachers. Personally, I have found the best way to handle Halloween in school is just to embrace the crazy! I pack my day with multiple Halloween themed activities to keep my students busy and on task. Below are three of my favorite Halloween activities!
Halloween Listening Activity:
Print out a plain picture of a haunted house. Make up about ten different directions to decorate the haunted house but make sure you are very specific. For example; draw a green ghost in the top window. Tell your students that you will only read each step two times so they have to listen very carefully! After you have gone through all the directions, go around the room and write down any students that completed the activity successfully. You will be shocked at how few students actually follow every direction correctly. It’s very telling. Students who do decorate their haunted house successfully can get a prize.
Halloween Writing:
Instead of our normal writing, on Halloween, we do a spooky writing activity. I put a picture of a graveyard or haunted house on the board, complete with haunted noises playing in the background. We will fill out a see, hear, smell, feel, and taste graphic organizer about the spooky setting. Then students have twenty minutes to write the best Halloween setting using those sensory details. We pick a neutral judge (I usually use my classroom aide but you can use anyone) to read all of the stories and pick three winners for the best Halloween writing. These students can get prizes as well. To differentiate, you can allow some of your struggling students to draw an illustration of their story or provide them with sentence starters.
Halloween Read-Aloud:
You can do countless things with a read-aloud. Turn and talks, graphic organizers, sequencing card games, the activities are endless! I like to read the book; Halloween Forest by Marian Dane Bauer. This is a fun book about an adventure in haunted woods on Halloween night. To really get into the mood, you can turn off the lights and use flashlights to read.
Remember: Keep Calm and get your Halloween on!
