Looking for classroom Halloween party ideas that will keep your little monsters engaged and learning during the month of October? Your students will love visiting a not-too-spooky haunted house with these fun idea
Setting The Stage
The night before your special day, transform your room into a spooky haunted house with spiderwebs, Halloween lights, plastic spiders, skeletons, plastic pumpkins, and spooky bulletin boards. Add some spooky music like the Monster Mash as a special touch when students enter the room.
Set up 8 different stations around the room to represent the different rooms in your haunted house. Each station will have different Halloween crafts and other Halloween theme games and activities.
It's also a good idea to recruit a room mom or some parent volunteers to help with the activities at each station. This will keep things running smoothly and help students transition from one station to the next. You can assign room parents to different stations to help during your Halloween classroom party.
Halloween Read Aloud
Begin your day with one of your favorite Halloween read-alouds. I like to read At The Old Haunted House by Helen Ketteman. It's a cute Halloween counting book with all kinds of creatures and sets the stage for your Haunted house activities. After reading the book, we talk about who you might see in a haunted house and what it might be like inside.
Next, tell the students that they'll be spending the day in a haunted house and will visit each room in the house. Elementary school classroom parties can easily get out of control so it's a good idea to establish a few simple rules to keep things organized.
I usually tell students they must stay at each station until the teacher gives the signal to move to the next area. Students can work in small groups and travel around to the different stations doing math and literacy activities – with a spooky twist!
Halloween Party Games For Your Classroom
1. The Spooky Basement
When the students visit the basement, they find spooky sentence starters. Words are divided into 3 baskets and the students can build a sentence, write it on their worksheet, and illustrate the picture. It's one of my student's favorite Halloween writing activities!
2. The Haunted Library
Inside the Haunted Library, students will become monster detectives as they go on a scavenger hunt for monsters in this cute write-the-room activity. Give your students a clipboard decorated with spider webs and a spooky pen and send them on the hunt for different monsters hidden around the classroom. Each monster will have a different word and they'll love trying to solve the monster message in this classic game for Halloween
3. The Laboratory
Easy crafts are a must for any Halloween party! The next stop is the haunted laboratory where students will create their own monster. For this activity, I had baskets with different construction paper geometric shapes. Students could create their own monsters using different shapes. For more fun and creativity, you can add googly eyes, yarn, feathers, pipe cleaners …..the list is endless!
4. Haunted Kitchen
No haunted house would be complete without a haunted kitchen! When the students visit this station they will make some spooky sight word stew.
I purchased some mini plastic cauldrons and creepy Halloween cups from the dollar store. I wrote the sight words on little tiles that looked like gravestones and cut them apart and placed each word in a cup. Each cup or cauldron contained a mixed-up sight word.
When students visit the haunted kitchen, they'll unscramble the sight words and write them correctly on the worksheet at the station. What a fun way to learn sight words!
5. The Witches Lair
Do you dare visit the witch's lair and try some of her special brew? Students will love this graphing activity where they graph witches' fingers (bugles corn chips), witches warts (mini chocolate chips), pumpkin teeth (candy corn), monster scabs (cinnamon cereal squares), and ghost poop (mini marshmallows).
This is a super fun way to teach graphing in October. It's always a big hit with students and one of their favorite Halloween games.
6. The Operating Room
Are you brave enough to visit the Operating Room in the haunted house? Poor Mr. Bones, a not-so-scary skeleton, needs to be put back together! For this game, I purchased mini plastic skeletons at the dollar store and cut them apart.
To play this fun game, the students roll two dice, add them together and choose the bone that matches their sum. With each roll, they begin to build Mr. Bones on their Roll A Skeleton work mat. The first person to complete their skeleton wins! This is a great way to practice some addition with a Halloween twist.
7. Spooky Attic
Every haunted house has a spooky attic where the monsters live! When students visit this station, they will practice measurement using candy corn to measure some monsters. If you don't have candy corn any small Halloween item will work for a non-standard unit of measure. It's the perfect Halloween game to help your little cuties learn about measuring.
8. The Graveyard
The finale to your classroom Halloween party activities for the day will be a visit to the graveyard! Here the kids will play a fun addition game called Ghosts In The Graveyard where they can practice some simple addition facts.
These Halloween math and literacy activities have been a huge hit in my room every year. I usually set this up as part of my Halloween class party activities but they'd also be great for your Halloween learning centers or even a family night at your school. The activities are perfect for kindergarten and first grade students.
Each of these classroom Halloween party ideas can be played alone or with a friend, so even if you're practicing social distancing in your classroom, the students can still have fun! Click here to check out all of these Halloween school party ideas. (UPDATED TO INCLUDE GOOGLE SLIDE ACTIVITIES)
Looking for more fun activities for the month of October? Check out these posts:
SAVE THESE IDEAS FOR LATER!
Take a minute to save these tips to your favorite Halloween Pinterest board so you can remember them later!
