“There is magic, but you have to be the magician. You have to make the magic happen.” ~ Sidney Sheldon, Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Halloween is a great time to get kids and teens to learn hands-on, participate in global collaboration projects, learn about other cultures and be creative. Students love the spooky stories, monsters, sounds, music, dances, treats, traditions, haunted houses, and costumes that surround Halloween. Below are tons of resources, lesson ideas, apps, games, recipes and resources for any teacher to celebrate in full force. These activities can be adapted to use throughout the year or to celebrate fall in case your school doesn’t allow you to celebrate Halloween. Watch the recording of my recent webinar on this topic here!
10+ Halloween Activities to Engage Learners from Shelly Terrell
50+ Halloween activities, games, recipes
Find all the Halloween resources and tools in the Slide presentation listed here!
25+ Activity Ideas
- JibJab Halloween Ecard Videos– students will love uploading images of themselves and their friends to create these funny e-cards. Only the Skeleton Dance is free till Halloween and the JibJab Halloween Monster Mash e-card is free till Oct. 25th. Here’s a lesson plan that is free to download and adapt. Here’s the video Rosco and I created!
- Have students work in pairs to plan a Halloween party then use some of the ideas in a class/school/club party.
- Haunted Stories Project- students research a haunted building or place locally or in a country/area you have them choose. They can find haunted places worldwide at Shadowlands. Then students interview people about the place either face to face, through the phone, or on Skype. They collect any research about the events like old newsclippings or written accounts. They summarize all this information and present in a multimedia tool like Capzles, Prezi, Tripline, ScribbleMaps, or Animoto. Dead Files and Ghost Hunters are great resources to find out about haunted places and their histories.
- Global Project– Skype or use Google HangOuts to contact another school and compare and contrast celebrations that celebrate using costume. A few examples include Fasching in Germany, Carnavale in Brazil, and Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico
- Global Project– Skype or use Google HangOuts to contact another school to host a spooky song Karaoke sing off or read Halloween books to each other
- Global Project– Skype or use Google HangOuts to contact another school and teach them one of the Halloween traditions like how to Trick or Treat
- Students create spooky stories or stories with monsters, ghosts, and other creatures using Storybird Halloween and Monster themes.
- Older students can create a Halloween children’s story that they will read to a class. Coordinate this through Skype like I did here or with a children’s school or class in your area. My high school students loved reading the books they created to school kids. Try any of these other book creation tools as well- Zooburst 3D stories or Little Bird Tales.
- Using these kid friendly Halloween jokes, students can do a jigsaw activity where one has the punchline and the other has the
- As a class create a Halloween safety tips story using Boom Writer.
- Animoto has free Halloween themed video frames– You can have students create a scene for a haunted movie flick. Tell students they will work in pairs to come up with the next monster kid’s movie. They have to create a video trailer to show producers.
- Students write about magic spells and use any of these bubbly potion recipes to study science and get to drink each other’s potions and pretend the spell worked 🙂
- Students invent the next Ben & Jerry’s Halloween themed ice cream flavor and make ice cream in a bag in class.
- Students make a Trick-or-Treat bag with healthy treats and safety tips.
- Students can play a Choose Your Own Adventure Zombie learning game. Here’s a lesson plan.
- Read famous spooky stories with great lesson plan ideas such as Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom and Dav Pilkey’s Halloweenie.
- Students can get into pairs, one describes a costume or monster that the other student draws. Learn English Kids has a fun Monster game they can play!
- Have themed costume dress days like dress as your favorite character, idioms, things that go in pairs, etc.
More Resources
- 18 Free Halloween Educational Apps
- 10+ Wicked Web 2.0 Activities for Halloween
- Horror-fied! 20+ Ideas and Resources for Halloween
- 10+ Halloween Activities Slide Presentation
- Halloween Activities for Young Learners Webinar Recording
Challenge:
Try any of these ideas with your students this month and tell us how it went.
