Get ready to bring some spooky fun into your kindergarten or first grade classroom with these Halloween activities! Incorporate these 5 Halloween-themed ideas into your curriculum to keep your students engaged and excited about learning throughout the spooky season.
Halloween is a magical time for kids, and adding some Halloween fun to the day can be extremely engaging for our students. The following ideas are all ways you can enhance your day-to-day routine with some pumpkins, spiders and ghosts! BOO!
READ HALLOWEEN BOOKS
Confession… I have more Halloween books than any other category! And for good reason. My students, year after year, were in love with them. So one of the easiest activities you can do, is read Halloween books! Read alouds are so important for providing students with opportunities to develop vocabulary, background knowledge and comprehension. Even more effective with super engaging Halloween books!
Here are five of my favorites!
The Pumpkin Blanket by Debrorah Turney Zagwyn. This is a sweet story about Clee, a little girl, who night by night gives up a square of her favourite blanket to protect the pumpkins in her garden.
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams. This classic picture book is a fun read-aloud. It is a cumulative tale and the growing pattern and repetitive text will invite your students to join in with reciting the story.
Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. This Halloween staple is another engaging read aloud with rhyming text and repetitive refrains. This story is about a witch who makes room on her broom for a collection of new friends.
Who Will Haunt My House on Halloween? by Jerry Pallotta. This seemingly spooky story ends with a fun night of trick-or-treating. It has simple text but is accompanied with detailed illustrations that add a lot to the story. Your students will love looking at this book over and over.
Halloween by Laura Marsh. This non-fiction book is filled with real photos and interesting Halloween facts.
PLAY A HALLOWEEN GAME
This Halloween Pocket Chart Game is a fun way to practice all sorts of skills! The cards are editable so you can program them with letters, numbers, sight words or whatever skill you want to practice. Put them randomly in a pocket chart and hide a Halloween surprise object behind one of the cards. Students have to read the card correctly before checking behind it to see if they have found the Halloween surprise. This game is fun as a whole group activity, small group work or makes a great 10 minute time filler. TIP: This game has Fall and Thanksgiving hidden objects too!
DO A PUZZLE
Add Halloween number puzzles to your math centers. Your students will love putting the numbers in order to reveal fun Halloween pictures. The numbers are editable so you can change them out to fit your math objectives or for differentiation. Your students can also cut and paste to assemble the puzzles with the black & white version included.
MAKE A CRAFT
Halloween crafts are the best! Try out this fun cut and paste Halloween craft that also doubles as color word practice. These cute colorful pumpkins on a gate would make a great Halloween classroom display! This is part of a larger set with pocket chart sentences and printables too.
WRITE THE ROOM
Write the room is always a favorite literacy center activity and is especially a hit with Halloween words! Get your students up and about and writing Halloween vocabulary. This free set has a variety of recording pages to choose from: tracing, printing, sorting by number of letters and reading the word in the context of a sentence.
I hope you found some Halloween Activities to try out in your classroom!
