The seasons have well and truly changed and it’s time to get out your carving knife and embrace all things orange – it’s Halloween! Talk of Halloween often enters the classroom; it’s easy for children to get swept up in the excitement and even though we try to focus on our learning in the classroom, talk often turns spooky as we creep closer to the 31st October. So, why not embrace it! Dedicate some time to Halloween activities with your students and provide them with an opportunity to let all their Halloween excitement out. This can help if you find your students are getting distracted at other times – save that thought for tomorrow afternoon during our Halloween activity! Here are a few of our suggestions on how you can bring Halloween into your classroom…
Dress your planner for the occasion!
If you love spooky season, or maybe if you need a little encouragement to get into the spirit of things, channel that Halloween energy and your creativity into your planner by decorating it! We have a couple of great Plan With Me packs for this season, which come with stickers, design sheets for you to use however you like, and a limited edition roll of washi tape – all designed to coordinate with a theme. If you really want to embrace the spooky vibe, check out our Spooktacular Plan With Me Pack, with witches, bats, skulls, ghosts and cobwebs to decorate your planner pages. If you want more of a general autumnal vibe, try our Autumn Tales Plan With Me Pack, full of colourful leaves, woodland critters, and an autumnal colour scheme.
Have a spooky story competition
This is a great activity that you can adapt depending on the year group you work with. For younger years, try making a short story with fill-in-the-blank words so the children can craft their own spooky story and make it their own! Then you can compare how they all finished the story differently – you could even have a few stories to choose from. For older years, ask them to write a short story of their own – something short enough to read out to the class. Then you can pop a campfire video from YouTube up on the board and sit around the fire reading out your spooky stories. This is a great way to get students excited about writing.
Halloween Pictionary
This activity is great as a seasonally-appropriate time-filler activity, or as a little reward for finishing tasks on time. Introduce the idea to the class and say you’ll be finding time to play this over the next week or two, and ask them all to submit ideas. When you have some time, pull one of the ideas out and ask a student to draw it on a board or on a flipchart, and have the rest of the class guess what they are drawing. How you manage this will depend on the dynamics of your classroom – whether they call out, you choose students, or the artist chooses who answers.
Read spooky stories
We love reading here at TPTC and we know lots of you teachers try to encourage a love of reading in your students too! So take the time to capture their excitement by reading some Halloween-themed and spooky stories as a class. Here are a few suggestions:
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KS1
- The Crayons Trick or Treat by Drew Daywalt – A great seasonal take on a staple children’s book that many of your students will be familiar with
- The Good, the Bad, and the Spooky by Jory John – This book from the Food Group book collection (a lovely series!) follows the Bad Seed as he tries to find the best Halloween costume to wear
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KS2
- Spooky Poems by James Carter and Brian Moses – Children often really resonate with poems and they are great fun to read aloud as a class. You could read some of these poems and encourage your students to have a go at writing their own!
- Crater Lake by Jennifer Killick – A great story about a group of Year 6 students going on a school trip where some scary stuff is going on! A great choice for a class book to read in the run up to Halloween, and can also open some conversations about moving up to secondary school, as the characters are all about to do this themselves
If you like book recommendations, check out our blog posts! We’ve got recommendations for you as well as for your class, find all our book recommendations here.
Plan it all out!
As stationery fanatics, we’re always looking for excuses to crack open a new To Do list pad or scribble on some pretty sticky notes! If you’ve got big Halloween plans, check out our planner pads and see if any of them might help you. We’ve got a wide range of different designs to choose from so you can pick your fave. Write a big to do list of all the Halloween things you want to do, ask your students to contribute spooky Pictionary ideas on sticky notes…or just use the season as an excuse to add to your stationery collection!
