Halloween Classroom Activities
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Halloween is the perfect time to have a little fun with your pupils. We’ve gathered together some brilliant Halloween classroom activities and crafts to help you make the most of this special festival. But first, let’s take a look at the history of Halloween…
Why do we celebrate Halloween?
Halloween is celebrated on the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day, beginning the three-day observance of All Hallowtide, a time of year dedicated to remembering the dead. Many of todays’ Halloween traditions, including Apple Bobbing, originate from ancient Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival of Samhain.
Both Christian and pagan Halloween customs have been accepted into popular western culture. Common Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving pumpkins, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, as well as watching horror films.
Halloween Classroom Activities
If you’re looking for some fun and gruesome Halloween classroom activities to do with your class, check out these three easy to create games:
Pumpkin Hunt
At PTS we love a good treasure hunt, and this is one of our all time favourite classroom activities. You will need hollowed out pumpkins in various sizes, scraps of different coloured card and some small prizes.
Hide your pumpkins around the school (and the school yard if the weather is dry). Split your class into groups of four or five and assign each group a particular colour. Inside each pumpkin will be a clue for each team (on the corresponding colour of card) to find the next. On the back of the clue will be a special Halloween character. The aim is to collect all of the characters as quickly as possible and claim their prize.
Characters you could choose from include; a witch, a ghost, a vampire, a zombie, a mummy, a skeleton and a monster.
Pin the Spider on the Web
A seasonal variation on all-time party favourite pin the tail on the donkey, pupils will love trying to stick Sidney Spider into the middle of his web.
On a large sheet of black sugar paper or card, use white paint (or chalk) to draw your giant spider web. Give each pupil a cardboard spider (if you’re feeling crafty, your pupils could make these themselves) with their name on. One by one they should put on the blindfold, spin around three times and then try to stick their spider as close to the middle of the web as possible (use blue tack or double-sided sellotape.
Halloween Feel Box
Cut a hole in a box large enough for a hand to fit in but not too large that you can see inside. Tape a plastic bowl or plastic bag securely inside the box so that when you reach through the hole you reach into the bowl/bag. Cut enough holes for each item in the feel box and tape on the rest of the bowls/bags inside the box. Then wrap the boxes in wrapping paper to further cover the openings so people can’t peak.
Ideas for your feel box contents:
- Hearts– Canned tomatoes
- Dry Skin– Cut up balloons
- Witch Warts– Canned peas
- Worms– Cooked spaghetti
- Eyeballs– Peeled grapes
- Spider Legs– Grape stems
- Fresh Skin– Banana peels
- Bat Livers– Canned mandarin slices
- Rat Droppings– Uncooked rice
- Troll Bogies– Raisins
Halloween Classroom Crafts
Make Monster Slime
It’s no secret that kids love playing with slime, so why not give your science lesson a Halloween twist by making your own? You can find some great monster slime recipes here.
Straw Skeletons
Do you fancy introducing your pupils to anatomy in a fun and crafty way?
You will need black card or sugar paper, white paper straw cut into small pieces, PVA glue and white chalk or crayon.
Introduce your pupils to the human skeleton and ask them to recreate it by sticking the paper straw onto the black card as if they were bones. They could use chalk or a white crayon to draw the skull and label the different bones/body parts.
Pumpkin Patch Classroom Display
Pumpkins are a popular symbol at Halloween and give us a great opportunity to introduce kids to this versatile vegetable. You could have tasting sessions with different pumpkin recipes, use pumpkin seeds for classroom crafts and discuss how pumpkins are grown.
Why not use all of your new-found knowledge to create a great pumpkin-themed classroom display? You could get each of your pupils to paint a Halloween pumpkin and add them to your pumpkin patch.
Wishing you a Spooktacular Halloween from everybody here at PTS.