With Halloween upon us this weekend, there’s lots of different ways that teachers can use Halloween in lesson planning to ensure a positive learning experience. Dress up your classrooms and get your students engaged with a haunting Halloween!
If you’re a teacher of Key Stage 1 or Key Stage 2, there are a number of creative tasks available online that enable pupils to use artistic skills to make Halloween items. Hope Education has compiled a list of things to create from around the internet – we love these egg carton spiders! Read their rundown here. Another great idea is global pumpkins, asking pupils to paint pumpkins to create their very own map of the world, whilst learning about latitude and longitude and physical geography.
Education City has put together a bank of Halloween resources, including everything from specific lesson plans for English, Maths and Science, to fun Halloween activities, including a history of Halloween suitable for younger pupils. They’ve also added a spooky 12 times-table song to their Times Table Song Series, listen to this and view the lesson plans here!
Schools could take a leaf out of the books of Crook Primary School, St Joseph’s Primary School and Darkley Primary School who have all previously held Halloween fancy dress days to get everybody into the spooky spirit. Remember that teachers have to dress up, too! You could even theme a class’ fancy dress around a current curricular topic to create a connection between the Halloween activities and topical learning.
As fun as fancy dress is, you don’t need to go all out to ensure that your pupils have a great Halloween. The simplest touches such as Halloween printed paper (available at Teaching Ideas), a few classroom decorations (and of course LOTS of sweets!) make a memorable Halloween.
However you and your school are celebrating, we hope you have a fantastic Halloween! We’d love to see pictures of your creepy classrooms and ghoulish activities. Tweet us your spooky shots to @Penstripe_
Olaf Surtees has been with Penstripe for ten years; what he doesn’t know about teacher planners, student planners, and lesson planners isn’t worth knowing! He’s in charge of creating our blog content, helping teachers and administrators with helpful hints and tips, as well as our socials — see the links below to find out more.
