Superhero? Cartoon character? Fairytale figure? Whatever your child wants to “be” for Halloween, they are all in, right? The costume? Super excited to share it and wear it. Halloween, with its fearfully fun shivers, chills, and giggles, can also conjure up cool learning tricks to try on.
Seasonal activities are virtually guaranteed to make learning more engaging, and Halloween themes can definitely get kids excited about playing with language. Spooky words, silly rhymes, riddles, and word games can encourage children to practice important early literacy skills without making learning feel like work.
So, round up your little pirates and princesses, and read on to uncover our top creepy-cool literacy activities. Explore wordplay tricks and treats that build skills and bring smiles.
Why wordplay is so important for young readers
Seasonal learning activities virtually always increase kids’ engagement, and Halloween provides a natural theme and context for experimenting with sounds, rhymes, new vocabulary, and storytelling. In turn, playing with words helps children develop early literacy skills. Bringing fun Halloween word games and rhyming activities to the party can bring big benefits.
The article Wordplay Part of Learning and Mastering Language? by Simon Horobin, University of Oxford, published on Biz Catalyst 360°, notes, “Studies of child psychology and education have shown the importance of play in putting a child’s developing linguistic skills into practice.” It continues, “Children have a natural propensity to play with language from an early age, as seen in the nonsense rhymes that accompany playground games, an enjoyment of riddles, puns, knock-knock jokes and so on.”
Wordplay helps preschoolers and early readers:
• Build vocabulary through new and unusual words
• Recognize sounds and word patterns
• Sharpen critical thinking and problem-solving
• Develop phonological and phonemic awareness
• Nurture creativity and imagination
Playing with words encourages listening carefully to language and makes early literacy practice feel as comfy as a superhero costume.
Little Busy Books: Learning Kids Can Take Anywhere
Recognizing kids’ high-energy anticipation of this gather-up goodies holiday, School Zone has produced a series of four Halloween-themed, 48-page workbooks in the Little Busy Book™ series for 3- to 6-year-olds. Each delivers learning activities that littles can enjoy at home, in the classroom, while travelling, or during family downtime. That makes them perfect choices for fall festivities, trick-or-treating, or autumn learning on the go.
Spooky Puzzles Workbook - Kids will sink their fangs into some fantastic Halloween learning as they solve a variety of mazes, hidden pictures, and dot-to-dot puzzles, along with simple crosswords, matching activities, and letter-connecting word fun.
Spooky Activities Workbook – Along with the mazes, hidden pictures, and dot-to-dot puzzles, kids do tracing activities to practice pre-writing.
Spooky Surprises Workbook - Clever cryptograms to answer riddles are added to the mix of other puzzles.
Spooky Coloring Workbook - Little learners move through the alphabet and numbers 1-10 with color-by-letter and color-by-number fun. Much more than a Halloween coloring book, with every turn of the page, the activities reinforce early reading, number recognition, and fine motor skills.
Each workbook also includes a page of adorable Halloween-themed reward stickers to add excitement and boost motivation! Use the workbooks in classroom centers and Halloween activity or trick-or-treat bags to playfully develop literacy, problem-solving, and independent learning skills.
During the month of October, get a bundled price on all four School Zone Spooky Little Busy Books!
Halloween Rhyming Games & Books to Get Kids Thinking
Working with rhymes is another way to build word skills. The article How Rhyming Words Help Children Develop Early Literacy Skills from U.K.-based Green House Learning says, “Whether you are a parent, teacher or home educator, incorporating rhyming into everyday activities is an easy and effective way to strengthen early literacy skills.”
Engage your little pumpkins in some Halloween rhyming fun and watch their skills and imagination soar!
Here are a few quick, silly, and accessible Halloween rhyming games for kids and books too, that young learners can play anywhere:
• Create silly rhyming pairs: bat/hat, boo/shoe, cat/hat. Make them up on the fly or get this Halloween Phonics Rhyming Pairs Matching Game from Twinkl as a free download.
• Give kids Halloween rhyming worksheets like these from Sarah Chesworth.
• Ask them to think of as many rhyming words as possible for easy, anytime, anywhere on-the-go learning. Start them off with bat, bear, or broom.
• Try finish-the-rhyme, Halloween-themed challenges. Begin with the longtime, singsong “Trick or treat, smell my feet. Give me something good to eat.” A few continuations found online are “If you don't, I don't care. I hope you have a happy scare!" and “Not too big, not too small. Just the size of Montreal” (from Reddit user Jul20218).
• Create silly Halloween sentences using rhyming words. Give some prompts to help them get going, like “The black cat wore a tall hat and sat on a fat rat” or “The giant spider drank too much cider and grew much, much wider.”
• Reading rhyming books is a great way to introduce and reinforce Halloween rhyming words. Try Five Little Pumpkins: A Rhyming Book for Kids and Toddlers or The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Creepy-Crawly Halloween: A Lift-the-Flap Book, a board book “With riddle-like questions prompting readers to lift colorful flaps to discover creepy-crawly creatures such as spiders, beetles, and more…”
And while not Halloween-specific, The Good Bad Cat from School Zone’s three-level Start to Read! storybook series is a rhyming book about a cat that, just like children, can be naughty but also not.
Bring Halloween Learning to Life with Anywhere Teacher
Wordplay comes in many forms. Among its 3000+ activities, School Zone’s Anywhere Teacher online learning program includes adorable Halloween wordplay fun for preschoolers and school-aged kids alike—really, the whole family—with Wordsearch Halloween Monsters and Wordsearch Halloween Stars. The former features creature words like ghost, zombie, and werewolf, and lots of words related to them like ooze, shrieking, and howling. The latter showcases “stars” like pirates and superheroes, along with related words like loot and raid. Appropriately spooky sound effects add to the fun!
Word searches expand spelling, vocabulary, and visual discernment skills, and they’re fun for every age. Each of these puzzles can be personalized for lots of variation and challenge by selecting one of three characters with different backgrounds and one of three difficulty levels.
Another Anywhere Teacher Halloween-themed wordplay option is Mix & Match Halloween Stories, which lets kids create spooky blends to make silly friends, or they can flip the top, middle, and bottom sections of the picture until they make one of nine character matches. This activity helps with visual memory and pattern recognition, as kids stretch their creativity, imagination, and wordplay skills.
These Halloween word games for kids are examples of effectively using digital activities to reinforce literacy skills. You can also search Anywhere Teacher using “Halloween” to find a range of games, books, videos, songs, and printable worksheets that develop many different skills.
They provide fun, easy, low-cost opportunities for independent learning and practice. Best of all, it’s learning that can happen at home, in the classroom, or on the go!
Treat kids to Halloween Interactive Read-along iOS eBooks
School Zone’s series of four Halloween-themed Interactive Read-along iOS eBooks put a seasonal spin on essential readiness skills including numbers 1-10, description words, prepositions, and colors and color words.
These eBooks, available as both downloads and on Anywhere Teacher, include:
• You Can't Scare Me! Halloween Interactive Read-along (iOS eBook) offers counting fun like “3 green goblins, you can’t scare me; 4 purple monsters, you can’t scare me.” Grab the movable object in each scene and change things up.
• Pumpkins! Halloween Interactive Read-along (iOS eBook) practices opposites and adjectives with a tall pumpkin, short pumpkin, and slimy pumpkin. Tap each unusual pumpkin and see what else happens. Ever watch a jack-o’-lantern cry?
• Ups & Downs Halloween Interactive Read-along (iOS eBook) teaches and reinforces words and concepts such as under, through, between, in front of, and behind. Tap the ghost pumpkin to pause and hear a joke. Or find the ghost hidden on every page.
• Guess Who? Halloween Interactive Read-along (iOS eBook) helps preschoolers learn and practice color and shapes. With purple yarn hair and green circle button eyes, can your child guess who it is? Use the cute stickers at the top of the page to decorate each scene
More Halloween Word Games for Spooktacular Literacy Fun
Of course, at home and in the classroom print word games and activities are great options too. (See recent post on the benefits of blended learning.)
Print word game possibilities include:
• Crossword puzzles expand vocabulary, practice spelling skills, connect sounds to letters, require critical thinking, sharpen visual discernment, and encourage focus and concentration. Check out this downloadable Halloween crossword puzzle from ezpzlearn.com that uses picture clues, which strengthens word-object word association. And education.com has a downloadable set of 6 Halloween crosswords!
• Word scramble puzzles offer many of the same benefits as crosswords. They also force kids to take a close look and then experience a sweet sense of satisfaction when they see how to rearrange the mixed-up letters. Here is one downloadable Halloween word scramble from ezpzlearn.com and another word scramble from Printable Paradise
• Halloween storytelling games get kids excited, stretch their imagination, and give word skills and critical thinking a workout. United Through Reading, among several Halloween activities, suggests a Spooky Storytelling activity for preschoolers and kindergartners by kicking off a story in a spooky setting and then taking turns adding to it. And a list of cute Halloween activities from Reading Eggs includes spooky story starters, with everyone in a circle adding a sentence to the story as it goes around.
Make Halloween a Little More Educational
