Halloween Center Activities to Keep Students Busy

What do you teach on Halloween? Halloween is a day when it’s really hard to teach any significant content, where students come to school in costumes or at least super excited about the holiday.  

As the day fast approaches, I bet we are all wondering how we will keep our students engaged, but not bouncing off the walls on this “special” day!

What we are doing on Halloween

Our school is doing a Halloween Parade for the first time in forever, well, at least the last ten years.  The Halloween Parade is first thing in the morning, to engage as many parents as possible.  I love a good parade, but you know, we do have the rest of the day with our students!

After the parade, I plan on having the students rotate through six themed centers.  I do this several times a year generally during the holidays.  These centers are all review topics and low-key, but provide a way for me to keep my students busy and engaged in academic tasks for most of the day.

In between center rotations, we have recess, lunch, read alouds, and other fun activities. Some years we even do some fun pumpkin measurement activities!

How to Organize Students into Groups for the Centers

I use my Center Rotation Cards to organize students into groups.  Each student has his or her own unique rotation, interacting with new students at each center.  The groupings are heterogeneous, so these aren’t good cards for reading groups but are perfect for rotations that don’t require ability groupings.

Students rotate through six stations.  I find that six stations is the perfect amount.  We generally do about 20 minutes at each station throughout the day, taking breaks for recess, lunch, read aloud, and other special things throughout the day. Really, you can make these rotation be an all-day activity.  

You can find more about the center rotation cards in this blog post.

Halloween Center Ideas

What are the six centers I’m using in October, you might ask?  Many of them are freebies I’ve found on TpT or created.

#1 Candy Corn Contractions

Two of my reading groups have been focusing on contractions this past week, so this Candy Corn Contraction Activity is perfect.

#2 Candy Corn Place Value

I also found this Candy Corn Place Value activity. We’re making some place value candy corns tomorrow out of construction paper and this is a great center to compliment it.

I also created these Candy Corn Puzzles that students can write on and create their own center.  It’s similar to the one above, but students create their own place value puzzles.

#3 Patterns on a Hundreds Chart

This Patterns on a Hundreds Chart will help my struggling students who need a bit more number sense practice.  Being able to make jumps of 10 is so important for two-digit addition and subtraction!

It’s also flexible enough to use with three-digit numbers. 

#4 Measuring Bats, Spiders and Ghosts

The next center is my Measuring Bats, Spiders, and Ghosts.  We’ve been avidly practicing measurement the past few weeks.

#5 Word Sort

The fifth center is a Witches’ Brew Nouns and Adjectives Activity from Clutter-Free Classroom.  Check it out in this blog post. 

#6 Halloween Money Matching

The final center is our Halloween Money Matching.  This has several different levels and includes multi-step word problems.  

What are you doing on Halloween to keep your students engaged, yet calm?