Digital Halloween Activities for Elementary Students
As the leaves fall and temperatures drop, Halloween is just around the corner. But what makes Halloween such a beloved celebration for both kids and adults? Is it the spooky costumes, the candy corn, or the mischievous fun? Whatever the reason, Halloween never fails to bring joy! Here are some digital Halloween activities that can keep your students engaged and having fun, whether they’re in the classroom or at home.
Utilizing these and other Halloween resources, you can increase student engagement in all content areas as the end of October approaches. Are you working on multiplication? Why not use pumpkins to do so? Learners are sometimes ‘tricked’ into practicing their skills with a fun and engaging website. It’s a ‘treat’ for all of us when students improve and grow as learners!
Digital Halloween Language Arts resources
Language Arts includes reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Many fun Halloween activities are available online to help students brush up on these core skills.
Listen to Halloween Stories
Kids love to listen to a spooky story that’s not too spooky. Find interactive stories, poems, riddles, costume interactives, and fine-motor games here.
These QR Code October Stories are great for engaging in your listening center. They can be used in person or online. Included in the resource are cards with the story title and QR code as well as links to all the stories. You can assign them via Google Classroom or put them around your room for students to access.
Be sure to monitor the level of scariness because our young learners sometimes act like they can handle more than they really can! The stories above are designed for early to mid-elementary, but be sure to preview them first to make sure they align with your school and classroom norms.
Need a list of more Halloween stories? Check out this post with some of my favorite ones.
Write Halloween Stories & Poems
Listening to scary stories is incredible, and it’s also fun to create them! This website has many writing prompts for Halloween, including story starters. Why not incorporate technology and have your students record themselves telling the story in addition to writing it? What a great way to practice fluency and speaking skills!
If you’re not ready to write a whole story, Halloween makes a perfect topic for poetry! Whether writing a limerick, couplet, Haiku, or another type of poetry, ghosts, goblins, and spooks of all sorts are just waiting to be part of your poem!
Work on Grammar Skills
Halloween is also the perfect time to work on synonyms and antonyms as well as shades of meaning. Choose a Halloween word and brainstorm (in person or virtually) all of the words that are similar to or different from that word. Cut apart the words and arrange them in groups of similar words or in order from least to most. If you’re doing this exercise virtually, use Google Slides. Insert each word as Word Art to make them draggable and less likely to be edited.
Are you studying homophones? Use this fun, interactive practice game – how many candy bars can you win in two minutes?
Math Digital Learning Resources for Halloween
Whether your math student is working on number sense, addition, subtraction, or even multiplication and division, there are countless online resources involving Halloween to encourage him or her to practice!
For the early learner practicing one-to-one correspondence, this fun Arthur game from PBS Kids is a very engaging opportunity to show what you know!
Another activity for elementary students is this spider-matching activity from National Geographic. Players begin at the Spiderweb level and progress to more challenging levels, collecting insect facts along the way.
Another multiplication game, this one in the form of an adventure, is The Legend of Multiplico. Cool graphics and fun-scary monsters will keep kids happily answering multiplication and division problems as they try to advance levels.
While trick-or-treating may look different this year, many families will still carve a pumpkin. Encourage families to do a little math with these fun pumpkin explorations.
Digital Halloween Activities for Social Studies
Dia de Los Muertos has become much more mainstream over the past ten years, but some students still may not know much about it. This wordless video tells the story of the holiday through lively animation and genuine interactions.
A brief (under two minutes), informative video on Dia de Los Muertos, produced by PBS, gives the historical significance and other facts about the holiday.
This website talks more about Dia de Los Muertos, focusing on sugar skulls. Dia de Los Muertos is an excellent opportunity to incorporate art into learning – learn how to draw a sugar skull here!
Science Halloween Activities
Are you just batty for Halloween?? We are too! Let’s incorporate some science as we learn all there is to know about these mysterious mammals called bats! This ten-minute introductory video about bats is just the thing to kick off a unit about bats.
You can’t beat the National Geographic Society for sharing accurate information on animals. Here is a brief video produced by National Geographic talking all about the wonders of bats.
Dig a little deeper into National Geographic Resources on Bats by checking out this website
Do you want to combine science AND writing?
Nonfiction Halloween Writing
Halloween is the perfect time to start writing about animals! Every year we dive into learning about spiders, bats, and other Halloween Animals, and then we write an informational paragraph about that animal. Here is a post on how we wrote about bats and how students were introduced to informational writing.
Social-Emotional Learning Halloween Activities for Digital Learning
Are you looking for some good, old-fashioned fun that also happens to be very relaxing? Try this online pumpkin carving activity! Kids will enjoy doing a dry run on their actual pumpkins or have fun carving, wiping the slate clean, and carving again. Artists can choose a traditional orange pumpkin, a green one, or a gourd.
Whew! With all of these terrific resources, it’s a shame that October is merely thirty-one days. (Maybe we should start a couple of days early!)
More Ideas for Halloween
Would you like some more ideas for celebrating Halloween in the classroom? These may not be technology-based activities, but are still fun at-home or classroom-based activities to get your students learning!
Jessica BOschen
Jessica is a teacher, homeschool parent, and entrepreneur. She shares her passion for teaching and education on What I Have Learned. Jessica has 16 years of experience teaching elementary school and currently homeschools her two middle and high school boys. She enjoys scaffolding learning for students, focusing on helping our most challenging learners achieve success in all academic areas.