[00:00:00] Well, friends, spooky season is here—only a couple of weeks until Halloween. That was one of my favorite holidays when I was teaching. We always had a big Halloween parade at our school, and parents would come and stand in the parking lot while the whole school put on a parade for them in our costumes.

The kids always looked so cute, and it was a lot of fun. So today’s episode is all about how you can have some spooky fun in your classroom without losing the academic time. So stay tuned—let’s get started.

If you’re lucky enough to be at a school where you can celebrate Halloween, you know that it can be kind of a blessing and a curse. Having the kids and teachers dress up in costumes and having a party was always fun and a much-needed reprieve from all the work.

But you also know that the day of the Halloween party was pretty much a bust. There wasn’t a whole lot of learning going on because the kids were either hyped up on sugar from trick-or-treating the night before or too excited about the party to learn [00:01:00] much. As much as I loved Halloween, I didn’t really want to let the whole day go to waste, and I didn’t want to deal with crazy kids all day either.

So I decided I needed to figure out a way to keep the kids busy, learning, and yet still having fun. So I decided we’d visit a haunted house. No, not a real haunted house in the literal sense, but rather a haunted house in our classroom.

This turned out to be so fun that my whole team joined in, and we did it every year. It really was a blast.

To set the stage, the day before our Halloween party, right before the kids went home, I’d read the story At the Old Haunted House by Helen Ketteman. It’s a cute rhyming book about a haunted house—not really too spooky, but it was fun because it showed the kids things you might see in a haunted house: stuff like ghosts, pumpkins, and witches.

After we read it, I’d ask the kids if they’d ever been to a haunted house before. Some of them had gone on haunted hayrides and things like that. So we’d make a list of things that you might see in a haunted [00:02:00] house.

And then after the kids left, I’d set my room all up. Some years we did this as an entire grade level and other years I just did it in my own room. I had eight stations that were designated to be the rooms in the haunted house, and at each station, kids would play a math or literacy game.

I’d hang spiderwebs in my doorway and hang yellow caution tape. I had a giant fuzzy spider that I hung from the ceiling, and I’d put spooky spiderwebs all over the room along with other spooky decorations. I had some little skulls that would light up and go “woo” every time you walked past them. It wasn’t scary enough to frighten little kids, but just enough to make it fun. Believe me—they loved it.

So there were eight stations, and they were all based on math and literacy skills.

The first station was the Spooky Basement. At that station, the kids had to make a spooky sentence. There were little mixed-up sentence cards, and they had to choose three cards for the beginning, middle, and end of the sentence, and then write and illustrate it. So they could make sentences that said things like, “A spider [00:03:00] will run in the forest.”

They could choose from different beginnings like the spider, a bat, or the monster. Then the middle was the action part, like will run or can hide. And the ending was the setting, like in the basement or in the attic. Every student’s sentence turned out different.

At Station Two, they visited the Haunted Library. This was a Write the Room activity. They had to search all over the classroom for the monsters who had gotten loose from the library. On the back of each monster picture was a word. The kids had to unscramble all the words, put them in order in a sentence, and figure out the mystery message. I think it said something like, “Happy Halloween from the Monster Family.”

At Station Three, they visited the Haunted Laboratory and made their own monster. I had trays of different shapes cut from construction paper with googly eyes, legs, and feet, and they could choose whatever they wanted to create their own monster.

At [00:04:00] Station Four, they visited the Haunted Kitchen. I found these creepy cups at the Dollar Tree that looked like skeleton hands were holding them. I wrote our sight words on pieces of paper, cut each word into individual letters, and put a different word in each cup. The kids had to figure out the word in each cup and write it on a Sight Word Stew worksheet.

At Station Five, they visited the Witch’s Lair, which was a math station where the kids graphed Witch’s Brew. Each student got a little baggie of treats that represented different spooky things. Bugle chips were witch’s fingernails, chocolate chips were witch’s warts, candy corn was pumpkin teeth, and mini marshmallows were ghost poop. The kids had to sort and graph everything in their brew at that station.

Station Six was the Operating Room, where they had to put Mr. Bones back together. It was an addition game where they rolled the dice, added the numbers, and then whichever number they got told them which piece of the Mr. Bones skeleton they could take. The first student to put their skeleton back together on the operating table was the winner.

At Station Seven, they visited the Spooky Attic where the monsters lived. I had a bunch of monster pictures in different sizes. Each student got a cup of candy corn and used it to measure the length of each monster, recording it on their Monster Measurement paper.

Finally, the last station was the Graveyard, where they played a little board game called Ghosts in the Graveyard. That was a math game.

When I tell you this was such a hit, I mean it! We always had our Halloween party and parade at the end of the day, and so visiting the haunted house stations in the morning was the perfect way to spend the day. The kids absolutely loved it, and I didn’t feel guilty that it was a lost day of instruction. They got tons of math and literacy practice, and they were having so much fun they didn’t even realize they were working.

It was especially fun the years we did it as a whole team. We each set up a station in our four [00:06:00] classrooms, and then we put the other four up and down the hallway. We decorated the hallway to be spooky, and we had a few parents come in to help at the stations. It was seriously a blast.

So if you’re dreading the craziness of Halloween—or maybe you’re looking forward to it but aren’t sure what to do that day—setting up a haunted house is the way to go.

If you want to try it with your class, I’ll put the link to the resource in the show notes. It’s got all the games and activities you need to do this in your classroom.

Okay, friends, I hope your class doesn’t get too hyped up on candy this year and that you have some spooky fun. Until next time, remember to make learning feel like play, and I’ll see you next week.