Halloween school activities are a great excuse for a bit of fun, where students can relax and enjoy bonding with their classmates and teachers. You might want to decorate the classroom (turn this into an art activity by asking the children to paint their own Halloween decorations), or even set up a face painting station to get everyone in the mood for Halloween classroom activities. While you’re enjoying the day, there are also many ways you can use Halloween to facilitate learning and practising behaviours. Here are some educational Halloween activities for primary school and preschool Halloween games.
Read a Halloween Book or Create a Spooky Story
Take the opportunity to involve Halloween activities in school storytime or circle time with a spooky book. This Room on the Broom Story Set comes with finger puppets that children can use to engage with the story and play along. You might also want to use Room on the Broom as the foundation for a sequence game, where children have to put the events and characters in order.
Instead of reading a Halloween-themed story to the children, you could also try making up your own. Start with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, and have each child in the circle come up with their own line to add to the spooky tale.
Make a Crawling Spider
School Halloween activities can help you to celebrate all the creepy crawlies that your students might be learning about or have already learned about. This is an opportunity to pique curiosity in children about nature and show them that bugs and insects aren’t anything to be frightened of, but something we should protect and respect. Spiders are some of the best candidates for this type of lesson.
Use classroom activities for Halloween to teach the children about the important role spiders play in the ecosystem and then help them to make their own crawling spiders with this tutorial by San Diego Zoo. All that’s needed for this craft activity is some card, pipe cleaners, tape, scissors, string, and markers or crayons. Each child can create their own spider and make it crawl up its own web.
Blow Paint Spiders
Here is an easy, straightforward art activity if you’re looking for crafty Halloween activities for kids at school. Your students might have already tried blow painting with you or at home. This easy technique helps young children to understand cause and effect, and try out different techniques (angle of their straw, how hard they blow into it, etc) to produce different effects. This technique also helps children to practice their fine motor skills and control over manipulating an object.
Prepare a sheet of paper for each of the students and put a dollop of black paint in the centre. Provide each child with a straw and task them with creating a spider by blowing the paint in different directions from the centre. Ask the children how many legs a spider has and challenge them to give their own spider eight legs.
Ghost Bombs
This fantastic idea for creating ‘ghost bombs’ is found on the blog Growing a Jewelled Rose. This is one of many exciting early school age Halloween activities that will have children on their feet and outside. Apart from getting kids active, you can ask the children to experiment with throwing their ghost bombs in different ways to produce different effects and try out dropping them from different heights.
For this activity you’ll need some white eggs, available from most supermarkets; cornstarch, or flour, but cornstarch is finer and will produce larger clouds; white tissue paper, glue, and a black marker.
Trick or Treat Game
It goes without saying that Halloween school activities for kids should involve sweets of some kind. Give your students the chance to win some sweets in class with this trick or treat game. Use the game to have students practising things they’ve learned in their normal lessons. Create some cards in advance to put into a bag that the children will draw from. You should include half ‘trick cards’ and half ‘treat cards’. Trick cards will pose a question that the person has to answer, try to quiz them on subjects they’re currently learning. For example, ‘what is the life cycle of a butterfly?’. Treat cards will have a challenge on them. For example, ‘hop on one foot for 30 seconds’.
If they get their trick question right or pass the challenge, they get a sweet. To make this game even more fun, have the students create their own trick or treat baskets to collect their sweets. Our Trick or Treat Baskets come pre-cut and are easy to fold and assemble, where each child can decorate the front and back.
Slime Handwriting Practice
Here’s an activity that will have young children mesmerised with a popular texture: slime. Combine a handwriting lesson with spooky slime for gruesome but educational Halloween at school activities. All you need for this activity are some plastic ziplock bags and coloured slime. Fill each bag with a little slime and zip shut. Since you’ll be giving these to your students you might want to secure the tops with duct tape for peace of mind that there won’t be any slime disasters.
Place each bag flat on the table so that each contains an even, thin layer of slime. Practice handwriting skills with the children by having them trace letters and words out on the bag. The children will be fascinated by the texture and movement of the slime. The ability to smooth it out and restart at a moment’s notice will make quick-fire handwriting practice easy. You could make your slime bags even more spooky by adding googly eyes or Halloween confetti. These sorts of Halloween fun activities for classroom work will have kids looking forward to handwriting lessons, as well as Halloween next year.
Pumpkin Decorating
Pumpkin carving might be a bit dangerous for little ones, especially if you don’t have enough eyes to watch every child turning their hand to carving in a Halloween activities classroom! But that doesn’t mean students can’t enjoy pumpkin decorating. In our Halloween Pumpkins Pack you’ll get 30 card pumpkin templates with different expressions to choose from. Hand these out to younger children along with crayons, paints, and montage materials to decorate their own pumpkins.
Halloween Idioms
If you’re after literacy classroom Halloween activities, here’s a fantastic game for older kids by ESL Kids Games. Originally made as an ESL resource, the slideshow works just as well for teaching KS2 children about idioms and how they work, with a Halloween theme, of course.
Each slide in the presentation shows a different idiom being portrayed visually. For example, ‘ghost town’ is an image of a ghost and of a city from above. Put this slideshow on the projector, or smartboard and tackle each idiom as a class.
Mummy Dress Up Challenge
Use the Mummy Dress Up Challenge to get build confidence and friendship among your students, and promote teamwork. For this Halloween activities school challenge, all you need is some rolls of toilet paper. Arrange your class into groups of two, three, or four and assign one person in each group as the mummy.
Each group will have to work as a team to dress their mummy by wrapping toilet roll around their arms, legs and body. They will need to use communication and teamwork to dress their mummy as well as possible. Each team will have five minutes of time planning how to dress their mummy and five minutes to dress them. Ask the children to come up with a plan, assign roles to certain people (e.g. two people dress legs, two people dress arms, one person dresses torso, one person rips and distributes toilet paper). At the end of the game, each mummy must be tested by walking across the classroom. The mummy whose bandages are the most intact at the end is the winner. Try and include at least one Halloween drama game in your celebrations to get kids moving and working together.
Create a Zombie Hand
When it comes to science school activities for Halloween, this experiment is bound to get some gasps, and probably some laughs too. Demonstrate the chemical reaction of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda with added creepiness by creating a growing, moving zombie’s hand.
For this activity, you’ll need a jar, some vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, and a latex glove (which you could decorate or paint to look more ghastly). Fill the jar with vinegar, and fill the inside of the glove with bicarbonate of soda. Fit the glove over the rim of the jar and watch as your zombie’s hand movies and inflates all by itself.
