Halloween presents a fantastic opportunity to incorporate all aspects of your curriculum into fun and educational activities. By blending spooky themes with interactive learning, teachers can ignite curiosity while keeping students engaged. Here are five creative ways teachers can celebrate Halloween in the classroom while engaging your students in learning.
1. I Scream, You Scream STEAM Challenge: Ice Cream Experiment
This activity, pulled from the STEAM Design Challenges Workbook Gr. 2, introduces students to chemistry and engineering principles through a fun race to make ice cream. Students work in teams to test how different types of salt (table salt, rock salt, etc.) affect the speed of freezing. They explore concepts like heat transfer, freezing points, and teamwork. The challenge fosters problem-solving skills, encouraging students to adjust their variables to create the quickest batch of ice cream. It’s science with a sweet reward at the end!
2. Halloween-Themed Math Activity: Visual Addition Fun
From Making Memories Month by Month, this Halloween-themed math activity makes learning addition more engaging with visual aids such as pumpkins, bats, ghosts, and candy. Using festive images to represent numbers, students solve addition problems while practicing counting and mental math. This activity makes math feel like a game and offers an inclusive way to involve visual learners. For an extra challenge, teachers can introduce subtraction or have students design their own Halloween math puzzles.
3. Halloween Feet Art Activity
This craft activity from Month-by-Month Crafts encourages students to experiment with texture and design. Students can use their feet or shoes to trace spooky "feet" shapes—such as Frankenstein toes or creepy claws—on paper. They can then cut these shapes out and glue them to tissue boxes which they can transform into wearable "feet" or spooky shoes. This activity incorporates problem-solving and imagination while reinforcing fine motor skills.
4. "Do the Math If You Dare" Interactive Bulletin Board
Found in The Giant Book of Bulletin Boards, this bulletin board transforms math problems into a Halloween adventure. Teachers create a display featuring spooky math challenges where students must solve equations to "unlock" windows and doors of a haunted house. It’s an excellent way to encourage independent learning, as students can interact with the board during free time or transitions between activities. For an extra bit of learning, teachers can rotate the problems daily or weekly, keeping the challenge fresh and exciting through Halloween.
5. "Don’t Be Scared of Compound Words" Interactive Bulletin Board
Also from The Giant Book of Bulletin Boards, this language arts activity helps students master compound words through an interactive, Halloween-themed game. The board displays spooky scarecrows that students can move to form various compound words. This playful activity strengthens vocabulary and reinforces reading comprehension.
Find More Inspiration in Our Downloadable Resource Books
By weaving various concepts into these Halloween activities, teachers can offer students an exciting way to explore every aspect of their curriculum, from science and math, to art and language. Whether they're racing to make ice cream or cracking spooky math challenges, students will have fun while learning key skills. These creative ideas show that Halloween can be about more than candy—it can also be a time to inspire curiosity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Get inspired beyond Halloween -- check out our downloadable resource books available immediately for inspiration all year long!