10 Fun Halloween Classroom Activities, Crafts, and Games for Kids

After Christmas, Halloween is the second most popular holiday in America which children and adults of all ages celebrate together with candy and spooky costumes. Since it’s such a big part of American culture, you, as a teacher, will need fun Halloween classroom activities, crafts, and games to celebrate it with your students. 

Halloween is fun, but it can also be educational, artistic, and creatively stimulating. All you need is the right lesson plan, some Halloween-themed learning projects, and playful activities to utilize this holiday and help children learn through unique methods. 

To help you out, we put together an elaborate list with specific examples and instructions of all the activities you can implement in your classroom this Halloween. 

10 Fun Halloween Classroom Activities for Kids

We made sure that all of the Halloween activities for kid listed below are easy to implement in a classroom setting and suitable for kids of various grade-levels (or require little to no effort to be adjusted to fit different curriculums). 

For each activity, craft, or game, we wrote clear instructions, shared specific examples, and even included links where applicable.

Make Halloween-Themed Geometry Collage 

Math is not the most exciting subject for most students, but it can take an artistic form thanks to Halloween. You can achieve this through a fun activity titled “Halloween-themed geometry collage”. 

To implement this, you’ll need a lot of color collage (alternatively, you can use colored paper and glue) and scissors for every student. The goal of this activity is for children to make Halloween-themed geometric paintings or simple objects (depends on the grade-level) only using geometrically shaped collage pieces. 

An excellent example of this would be making spiders, bats, candies, or more detailed drawings using small geometric collage pieces like triangles, circles, rectangles, ovals, and more. 

Encourage students to use many small pieces instead of a few large ones, making the object more detailed and realistic. You can even work from a picture outline, calculating the diameter or sides of the geometric shapes needed to transform that picture into a same-size geometric collage with middle and high school students (for elementary school kids, this might be too advanced). 

Take Halloween Quizzes, Crossword Puzzles, and More

Solving puzzles or taking a quiz are also fun Halloween activities for kids, considering you have the right resources. In our worksheet library, you’ll find a variety of Halloween-themed worksheets that explore this holiday from so many different aspects. Some of them include:

• Halloween Facts worksheet bundle with 35 in-depth pages for teaching students about the Halloween holiday. 
• Halloween Folklore worksheet bundle with 18 pages for teaching students about the origins and rich history of this holiday. 
• Samhain Facts and Worksheet bundle with 23 pages for teaching students about Samhain – the Celtic alternative and origins of today’s Halloween.
  Day of the Dead worksheet bundle with 24 pages for teaching students about the Mexican holiday that’s celebrated on the same day as Halloween in America. 
• Halloween Deities worksheet bundle with 25 pages for teaching students about the Halloween deities that live underground.
• Pumpkin Facts & Worksheets bundle with 23 in-depth pages for teaching students about pumpkins and their relationship with Halloween.

We probably have the largest collection of Halloween worksheets with plenty of quizzes, crossword puzzles, and many more fun Halloween activities for kids on our website, including specific topics like Jack-O-Lantern, Ghosts, Black Cats, Samhainophobia (fear of Halloween), Trick or Treat, Vampires, and more. If you’re stumped on where to start, why not check out our free Halloween curriculum, which breaks the holiday and associated worksheets into manageable parts!  

Decorate a Pumpkin

Halloween is not just about the candy. Pumpkins are incredibly healthy, as they’re pumped with vitamins and minerals. One way to make children more interested in pumpkins is to let them carve or decorate the pumpkins while you bring cooked pumpkin as a snack. 

To implement this activity, you’ll need to ask students to bring small pumpkins to class. It’s a good idea to bring a bunch yourself, in case someone forgets. Also, inform children about the materials needed to carve and decorate a pumpkin so they can be prepared. 

Decorating or carving a pumpkin is an activity that allows children to express themselves creatively, although the benefits stretch far beyond that.

First, it’s a great opportunity for sensory learning. Children will see, touch, and play with a lot of different sizes, shapes, and colors of pumpkins. They will feel the difference in weight before and after carving, and learn how different textures affect the colors (instead of drawing and painting on regular paper).

Second, if you ask children to plan out their design and draw it first, before starting to carve and decorate directly, they’ll have to use their critical thinking skills, work on their visuospatial intelligence, and develop fine motor skills. 

Finally, carving and decorating pumpkins will make children feel like they’re involved and contributing to the holiday’s activities. Feeling valued affects a child’s development and motivation positively.  

Learn Through Experiments with Candy 

Science is one of the coolest subjects, especially when you teach by proving its principles using interesting and unusual objects from the students’ daily life. This is why we believe that experimenting with candy can be an incredibly fun Halloween classroom activity for kids. Here are our top 3 experiments for you to implement: 

Dancing Gummy Worms

To make this experiment, you’ll need two glasses (clear cups) with warm water, vinegar, baking soda, gummy worms, and a knife (to cut the gummy words in three slices so they can fit the cup better). 

Make children mix 3 tablespoons of baking soda with 1 cup of warm water. After this, put the cut gummy worms in the mixture and wait for 15 minutes for the worms to soak. Once 15 minutes have passed, fill the other cup with vinegar and transfer the worms from the baking soda mixture to the cup with vinegar. After a few seconds, they’ll start writhing toward the surface of the glass. 

Candy Acid-Test

If children know about acids and bases from chemistry, then they’ll enjoy the acid test that shows whether and how much acid the candy has. 

To show this, you’ll need sweet and sour candy (sour Skittles work best), water, and baking soda. All you need to do is fill the glass with water, add the candies, and then the baking soda. If the candies have acid in them, the water will start to bubble/fizz after adding the baking soda. The more acid the candy has, the more bubbles will form. 

Dissecting Candy

The third experiment is aimed at figuring out the components of the candy. Obviously, this works best for multi-layered candies like snickers. The children should isolate and label each part. They can even compare similar components in different candy- their taste, texture, and color, which might indicate they were made differently or use different ingredients (for example, more or less sugar).

While the children are working on this, you can talk with them about the nutritional values of each ingredient and how that affects the children’s health. 

Make Halloween Decorations

As one of the more fun Halloween activities for kids, the best way to prepare for Halloween is for all the students to be involved in decorating the classroom

First, you can place a small table where you’ll put all the decorated and carved pumpkins (described above) that your students have made. 

Second, you can provide students with colorful construction papers, glue, scissors, modeling clay, color collage, and more. Along with the tools, give children some ideas on how to make spiders and spider webs, bats, witches on brooms, and many other decorations that symbolize Halloween. 

Read a Book 

Halloween stories are usually very mysterious, a little spooky, and entirely captivating from start to finish. After making Halloween decorations for the classroom and working on the kids’ artistic skills, it’s smart to balance that out by practicing their reading skills and literature analysis. 

Here are our recommendations on some of the best Halloween children’s books.

• Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.
• The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda D. Williams and Megan Lloyd.
• Spooky Pookie (Little Pookie) by Sandra Boynton.
• Ten Timid Ghosts (Scholastic Paperback) by Jennifer O’Connell.
• Little Blue Truck’s Halloween by Alice Schertle and Jill McElmurry.
• The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain.

If you work with upper-middle school students or high school students, here are some books you can analyze this Halloween.

• Frankenstein (Signet Classics) by Mary Shelley. 
• The Curse of Wendigo: The Sequel to The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey.
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. 
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
• The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. 

Play Pumpkin Bingo

This special edition Halloween bingo is not your everyday vocabulary or math bingo, but instead, a bingo that focuses on promoting empathy and emotional intelligence in children. 

To play, you’ll need a plastic spinner, a clock with different emotions (on which the spinner is used), dot markers, and bingo combinations. It works by using the spinner to get an emotion from the clock template. If the student has that emotion on their bingo combination printable, they mark it with the dot marker.

The emotions are drawn as a pumpkin with a face that conveys different emotions like being happy, sad, afraid, shy, laughing, etc.

Since Halloween can be spooky and scary, this is an excellent opportunity to work on the children’s emotional intelligence. You can also see whether they can recognize different emotions in others, and give them descriptions to learn how to express their feelings verbally. 

Work on Halloween-Themed Creative Writing 

What is Halloween? This question can be answered very straightforwardly with facts and definitions, but it can also be answered in a fun way with a twist, like from a candy’s perspective, or from the character’s (of the child’s disguise) perspective. 

Is the child going trick-or-treating as batman? Ask them to write a funny sentence or short text on why batman would need candies on Halloween.

To take it up a notch, you can ask students to also draw an interesting and funny drawing to match the text, while for older students, you can ask them to write a short fictional story revolving around their costume character.

Make a Halloween Costume

Trick-or-treating is the most exciting, highly-anticipated event for most, if not all, children. Deciding what to go as is half the fun, while finding the right elements to complete the costume can be just as fun or incredibly frustrating. 

Not everyone can afford expensive costumes for Halloween, which is why it’s a great idea to work on Halloween costumes in the classroom. Plus, this is another one of those fun Halloween activities for kids that everyone enjoys! This can be achieved in three steps. 

First, ask the students what they want to disguise as and why. Let them think about the idea they want to portray for a few minutes and then ask them to describe that character, person, or even object. The task will also be an excellent practice for their literary skills in character descriptions. Tell them what they need to focus on and include in their short essay. 

Second, instruct students to make a list of all the things they’ll need to portray their idea authentically based on the description they’ve made. Will they need a cape, an eye mask, hat, wings, broom, and so on.

Finally, start working on some of the things that can be made in the classroom, like hats, necklaces, costume-decorations, face masks, and more. 

This activity will also help you identify students who might not be able to afford a costume for Halloween. With the help of all the classmates, you can help those students realize their wishes.

Learn Through Spider Equations

We started our list with a Halloween activity for learning math, and we’re finishing our list with yet another fun Halloween activity for kids through which students can practice their math skills. However, instead of geometry, with the “Spider Equations,” students will practice arithmetics. 

To play this game, you’ll only need construction paper and scissors. Draw and cut circles with eyes that will represent the trunk of the spider. Each circle, or each spider, should have a value, for example, 17+23. Also, draw and cut a lot of stick-shaped pieces of paper representing the spider’s legs. On these pieces of paper, the students should write equations or operations with the same value as the spider’s body. For each correct answer (using different operations), the student will get one point.

After you finish the game, you can use these math-spiders as Halloween decorations for the classroom. 

Before You Leave

Hopefully, now your mind is at ease, knowing how you will meet and exceed your students’ expectations. When it comes to Halloween, this is not an easy task, but thanks to our ten fun Halloween activities for kids, your students will subtly learn about math, literature, and more, while having the time of their lives. 

However, Halloween is not the only holiday you can use to captivate children’s attention in the classroom. If you check out our website, you’ll find an extensive collection of interactive worksheets covering all the holidays throughout the year. We also regularly update our blog, where you can find valuable information about children’s development, education, teaching methods, and so much more. So, don’t hesitate to visit us and join the fast-growing community of experienced teachers, homeschool tutors, and parents.