The first major holiday of the school year is Halloween, and there are so many ways to incorporate this spooky celebration into your curriculum. 

Believe it or not, Halloween themes like ghosts, pumpkins, and spiders can be turned into interesting science and art lessons. Halloween is the perfect time to teach your students concepts in all subject areas across the curriculum for cohesion and structure. 

Here are some easy and memorable ways to use the fun of Halloween across various subjects that your students will love. 

SOCIAL STUDIES

Summer’s End, Harvest, Seeds, and Pumpkins

The fall harvest marks the end of summer, the beginning of autumn, and the time to gather crops. Use pumpkins to teach students about a garden (or pumpkin patch!) and share that a seed makes a pumpkin grow. A pumpkin is a vegetable that varies in size, from very small to very large. Check out these helpful books to teach your students about pumpkins and crops that are typically harvested in the fall.

SCIENCE

Nocturnal Animals

Many animals are nocturnal, which means that they are awake and active at nighttime instead of in the daytime. Nocturnal animals include bats (like vampire bats!), cats, owls, mice, rats, and spiders. 

Hide black cutouts of nocturnal animals around the room. Hang up a plastic glow-in-the-dark moon. Turn off the lights, play some Halloween sound effects, and let your students search for the animals with flashlights.

These books about nocturnal animals, their daily habits and behaviors will further captive your students.

Skeletons, Bones, and Blood

Everyone has a skeleton of more than 200 bones inside their bodies. Without a skeleton inside us, we would all be blobs. A body is built with bones, just like a house is built with beams. Bones allow us to move, and they act like helmets or armor to protect other parts of our bodies.

Blood is the red liquid inside our bodies that helps us breathe and carry nutrients to our organs and tissues. We can see blood when we cut ourselves.

Discover these books to help you talk to your students about human anatomy.

Mummies

Ancient people protected dead bodies by wrapping them up before burial. These preserved bodies are called mummies. 

Mummies don't have to be scary though. Let your students create their own mummies with masking tape, paper strips, and googly eyes. Then, read up more on the history of mummies with these fascinating books.

MATH

Measuring, Weighing, Comparing, and Sequencing

Get five pumpkins of different heights and widths. Cut two lengths of string for each pumpkin, one for the height and one for the width. Have your students measure the pumpkins by height and width by finding the right size string for each. Let your students weigh the pumpkins, either with a scale or by picking them up and deciding which is heaviest. Then, ask your students to sequence pumpkins by height, width, and weight.

Counting, Matching, and Sorting

Cut the tops off pumpkins and clean them out, or use fake pumpkins. Number them and have your students put the right number of seeds inside each.

Sorting

Have your students sort candies like M&Ms, Skittles, and Starbursts (or any other multi-colored candy) by color, shape, or size. 

READING

Independent Reading

To make independent reading more fun and memorable for Halloween, turn off the lights, put on thunderstorm sound effects, and let your students read Halloween books with flashlights. 

Check out these Halloween-themed reads your students will love.

ART

Here are some fun subjects to try for art class: 

Jack-o-Lanterns

Make a pumpkin, shirt, and pants pattern with construction paper. Have your students cut them out and put them together with paper clips. They can decorate the faces to make a jack-o-happy, jack-o-sad, jack-o-angry, jack-o-scared, jack-o-surprised, or whatever emotion they want. 

Spiders

Have your students make a spider with their handprint facing both ways. Remember, there are only four fingers on each side. You can also include different colors of glitter and add-ons to make them stand out!

Skeletons

Provide a skeleton pattern, with bones for your students to cut out and put together with paper clips. Students can also add glow-in-the-dark markers to their skeletons. 

Ghosts

Let your students draw ghosts on white paper using invisible ink. Then, switch UV lights on and off to make the ghosts appear and disappear. You can either use a ready-made invisible ink pen or lemon juice for the ink. When using lemon juice, heat will make the ghosts appear just as well, but they will not be able to disappear again. 

Witches

Follow these directions to make a zipper witch: 

1. Make a pattern of shapes for the witches hat, head, nose, dress, and shoes. 

2. Have the kids cut out the shapes and glue everything together except the shoes. They should glue the shoes on to one end of the zipper, and then glue the other end of zipper (long or short) to the back of the witch for the legs. Reinforce with staples. 

3. Use yarn for the hair, and markers for the eyes and mouth.

4. Tape on a twig with yarn for the broom. 

Monsters

For this activity, have your students create their own creatures using paint, yarn, glitter, buttons, or any other materials they’d like to use. Let them get as creative as they’d like! 

LANGUAGE ARTS

Disguises and Vocabulary

Print out the following rhyme, leaving enough space at the bottom of the page for a picture:

Knock, knock, sounds like more 

Trick-or-treaters at my door.

I open the door and what do I see? 

____ ____ smiling at me!

Have each child decide what disguise their trick-or-treater(s) will be wearing. That will go in the second blank. How does this disguise describe them? That will go in the first blank.

Alternatively, you can come up with the vocabulary as a class, and let each student pick one. 

Disguises and Writing

Draw a ghost on two pages. On the first page, write: “Ghost, ghost, tell me do, who is hiding under you?” On the second page, write: “Who wants to be seen dressed as ______  on Halloween!” Have the children fill in the blanks and draw themselves under the ghost. 

Shop the best Halloween read-alouds below! You can find all books and activities at The Teacher Store.