Kids love Halloween, making it the perfect opportunity to sneak in a little learning. Cue up creative costumes, ghoulish decorations, big shrieks, safe scares, and overflowing trick-or-treat bags, and your little pumpkin’s anticipation amps up to “vibrate” mode, right? Now mix in a few surprising games and activities to round out the festivities, and long after the candy’s gone and the superhero cape is stuffed in the closet, kids will figure out they somehow feel smarter.
Read on to learn how seasonal themes make reading and learning more engaging for children, and to discover games, activities, and School Zone resources that add screaming good learning to happy Halloween hijinks.
Why seasonal learning works
The lead-up to Halloween and other holidays crackles with energy. Both at home and in the classroom, themed and seasonal learning activities are effective because they:
• Tap into pre-existing excitement that boosts engagement.
• Make abstract skills like math or phonics more tangible.
• Build creativity and connection between play and academics.
Thematic learning helps even the little learners see how different parts of the world are connected. The Teacher’s Brain article “4 Ways Seasonal Themes Help with Classroom Engagement” notes that familiarity and excitement together are a big factor. It says, “Seasonal themes work because they are already part of your students’ lives. They see pumpkins in stores, feel the crisp autumn air, and notice the changing leaves.” It continues, “When you bring these familiar elements into the classroom, it helps make learning feel more connected to the real world.”
The other 3 ways they suggest seasonally themed learning benefits kids are that it helps with retention and encourages both creativity and multisensory learning. For example, the article points out that something as simple as the poem “5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate” has “opportunities for teaching literacy, math, and even science!” The site host has created what she describes as “a special resource that pairs this classic poem with engaging STEM activities designed for kindergarten and first-grade students.”
Spooky Reading Activities for Kids
Along with the usual ways we describe and think of Halloween, add “opportunity to build literacy skills” to the list. Yep, Halloween literacy activities can look like nothing but fun.
A post to the Treehouse Schoolhouse blog again emphasizes how themed learning helps pull different pieces together. It says, “This approach helps kids see how everything is connected – facts, stories, and ideas all overlapping.” Even more specifically, the post says, “Reading books around a common theme lets kids explore how an idea shows up in different ways, sparking new connections along the way.”
Themed books, combined with word games and vocabulary-building activities, can create a frightfully effective learning experience. Here are a few Halloween reading activities:
• Spooky Story Starters - Give Halloween-themed prompts to write their own mini-stories, perfect for vocabulary and creative writing. An example would be: “One foggy Halloween night...”
• Pumpkin Sight Word Hunt - Hide paper pumpkins with sight words; kids find and read them aloud. Use School Zone’s Sight Words Flash Cards for inspiration
• Halloween Interactive Read-Along iOS Books – School Zone takes a quartet of board books and brings them to life onscreen. In Pumpkins!, kids tap each unusual pumpkin and see what else happens. Tall pumpkin, short pumpkin, slimy pumpkin. Slimy? You bet, and what a silly, squishy, splatter sound it makes. Eeww, that’s gross! Ups & Downs 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 hidden ghost on every page. You Can’t Scare Me! presents “3 green goblins, you can’t scare me; 4 purple monsters, you can’t scare me!” Find spooky surprises on every page as the counting fun continues. Grab the movable object in each scene and change things up. Or tap a pumpkin to pause and hear a joke. At the end is a sing-along video with lyrics appearing onscreen. “What are you scared of?” “What makes you run away when it jumps out?” It’s a creepy, giggly good time. With Guess Who? preschoolers will gobble up learning as they practice colors, shapes and more. With purple yarn hair and green circle button eyes, can your child guess the riddle of who it is? Use the cute stickers at the top of the page to decorate each scene with more objects of the same color.
• Halloween Word Games - These could include a word search, word unscramble activities, or spelling games that are just Halloween-themed. School Zone’s Anywhere Teacher online learning program for kids ages 2-8 has several hauntingly fun Halloween-themed activities, including Halloween Monsters and Halloween Stars word searches, each with three levels of play. It also includes Mix and Match Halloween Stories, where kids can spin the top, middle, and bottom sections of a picture with words until they match up or mix them up to create some super silly, giggle-producing combinations of characters, costumes, and phrases.
Halloween Math Games for Kids
Word activities aren’t the only seasonal attention-getters. Sharing the learning spotlight this time of year are Halloween math games for kids. Here are a few:
• Monster Math Bingo – Try combining a traditional numbers-only math bingo game from Toy Theater or an image-only version of Halloween bingo from Crazy Little Projects. Create some bingo cards with math problems (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), with the “answers” being spooky images such as bats, ghosts, etc. (For example, create a key where a bat = 7 and a ghost equals 12.) What a great brain workout! Save some time on the creation by pulling equations from School Zone’s Addition 0-12 Flash Cards, Subtraction 0-12 Flash Cards, Multiplication 0-12 Flash Cards, and Division 0-12 Flash Cards.
• Candy Counting and More – Use candy corn, small treats, or if you happen to have other small Halloween items, use them for sorting, counting and practicing basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. The haul from trick-or-treating poses another good opportunity. If they have 42 treats and gobble up 6 a day, how many days will they last? Try a little categorizing too. How many of one kind of candy and how many of another? For older kids, consider asking them to estimate their totals and give a prize to whoever is closest. For little learners, check out this Halloween Candy-Counting Song from Play & Learn Class. And Little Bins for Little Hands uncovers “the magic of candy math” with Halloween-themed activities for practicing word problems, estimation, probability, addition/subtraction, graphs, and counting.
• Halloween Math Investigations – Put a spin on your usual math activities by adding Halloween scenarios to them, either by hand or with stickers, like this book with 250+ from Walmart or this Haunted House Sticker Book by Creatology™ available at Michael’s. Amy Porter has compiled some great Free Halloween Math Activities. They include “13 Days of Spooky Math Challenges.” “Mummy Math: Estimation & Measurement,” and a math facts memory game using Hershey kisses.
Tips for Balancing Fun and Learning
Adding spooky math and reading games into the mix of Halloween activities is a quick and easy trick for treating kids to great learning. Kids First, in their article “How to Create a Balance Between Learning and Playtime,” emphasizes that “Balancing learning with playtime is crucial for a child's holistic development.” Certainly, learning that feels like play to kids increases their motivation and retention. But even then, it’s important not to overdo. As with so many things, balance is the key. Here are a few tips:
• Use Halloween treats (stickers, sweets) as motivators
• Keep activities short, fun, and age-appropriate
• Incorporate short breaks with movement or fresh air to help children stay alert and focused
• Use Halloween-themed storytelling techniques (if applicable) to build your child’s imagination and keep them engaged during learning
Make Halloween both spooky and smart
Use seasons and holidays to your advantage as opportunities for themed learning that help kids forge connections of many kinds. Halloween is more than costumes and candy; it’s a chance for educational Halloween games and activities. As Treehouse Schoolhouse notes, “For preschoolers and younger kids, thematic learning softly introduces new topics and helps them see how all parts of the world are linked.” They add that “Older children benefit as well, as this approach boosts their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.” In general, themed activities lead to a deeper, richer learning experience.
Explore School Zone resources, including Anywhere Teacher, for seasonal- and holiday-themed learning activities as well as books, flash cards, workbooks, and more that help make learning fun, festive, and memorable 365 days a year.
