10 Absolute Kid-Favorite Halloween Teaching Ideas & Resources [episode 35]

I am so excited to be here with you again today on the podcast in your earbuds, I hope you’re having a fabulous day so far. So before we dive into all things Halloween, which I’m so excited for, I want to make sure that you know about the free coaching call that we are doing on September 28. And it is open to everyone to attend to. So you don’t have to be a member of Wife Teach Mommy club to attend this call. We know that teaching has been a lot lately. And so I want to get back to you. So you can learn more about the mindset strategies that we teach in the club. And it’s completely free. There’s no obligation to join anything. And as Chrissy says sometimes one call is all it takes, you might have a little mindset shift that helps you just from attending this one call. So if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while you heard about the coaching and you just want to see more what it’s all about. This is a great way to do that. It’s happening on Wednesday, September 28, at 4pm, Pacific 5pm, mountain 6pm, Central, 7pm. Eastern, so be sure to watch our email list for more information. And if you’re not there yet, head on over to our show notes to sign up. And that’s going to take place on Facebook Live. So make sure you’re following our page as well. And if you’re not able to make it live, or if you’re listening to this later, when the call has already happened, you’ll be able to watch the replay on Facebook. But I’m also planning to put the replay here on the podcast probably the week after in October. So you’ll be able to listen to it right here on the podcast just like our members get to do on the private podcast. They have their own little members only podcast so when they aren’t able to attend a coaching call live, they can listen on the go do whatever they need, you’ll be able to do just that with this coaching. So we’re putting it on the main podcast so everybody can enjoy it. So I cannot wait.

Okay, so you might be thinking if you’re seeing this episode, right when it first drops on September 20, you might be like it’s way too early to talk about Halloween. And let me tell you, I don’t think that it is. If you’re at my house, my husband he has been preparing for Halloween for over a month now. My husband and my brother in law, they are super into Halloween decorating all the things. My husband he has an old 50s truck. It’s a 58 Chevy it’s red. So cute. We did the Christmas truck thing with it. But he decorates it for Halloween too. Last year, he created this giant giant pumpkin that we put in the back and whenever we drive it around, it just makes everybody smile it makes their day. So fun. So we love Halloween over here, we can talk about it all year round, basically. But really the reason I am dropping this episode now is it gives you time to plan ahead if you’re listening now. And also others might not get around to listening to this episode for weeks later. So I want to make sure you have plenty of time to listen to this episode. I know you’re not always able to listen right when it drops, and I have some great ideas and I want as many teachers as possible to be able to benefit from them. This is going to be a quick episode today. Because I know a lot of you like the short, quick wins. And that is what I’m going to make this today.

So I’m talking about 10 of my favorite activities. And these are all based on Wife Teacher Mommy resources. So if you are one of our club members, you’ll be able to go in and grab something to use to implement this activity ASAP. And they’re also all available for individual purchase. But the way I want to explain these activities today is that you can still take some awesome ideas whether or not you were using our resources, I want to make sure that you get something actionable, some type of fun activity that you can implement in your classroom with or without our resources. So before we dive into all of these awesome, super fun Halloween ideas, I would just want to make sure one little caveat. Make sure of course that do whatever you need to do for any students in your class. So if you have like Jehovah’s Witnesses in your class, make sure to chat with them chat with their parents. I am going to be explaining these ideas as if you’re going to be doing these activities with your full class or with your homeschool, but that is just something to keep in mind, you might need to adjust some of these for your own scenario.

With that, let’s dive in. So I have 10 ideas I want to share with you today. Now the first one is called a Halloween boo. So I don’t know if you have done the thing in your neighborhood where it’s like your doorbell rings, and then somebody leaves treats, they ran away, you don’t know who it is. And then you put the ghost in your window, and then you go surprise somebody else. Well, I kind of came up with this idea where we do a secret Halloween Boo in the classroom. So it’s super fun. Each student is assigned another student secretly who they get to write little letters to and they’ll secretly like put it on their desk, or if you have like cubbies or whatever. And there are writing prompts that you can do with each one. So what is something you like about your secret friend, or what is something that your secret friend is very good at, or what is something nice that you notice them do? So they just kind of get these nice little notes throughout the month. And then on your Halloween party day you get to all reveal who has who this is such a fun activity. And honestly, you don’t technically need any materials for it, just find a way to assign each student and come up with just a few prompts. You can write them on the board or whatever. And you can do this activity. If you do want it all done for you and you want super cute printables to go along with it, we have those in Wife Teacher Mommy club. And we also have them available for individual purchase. So I will put the link to that in the show notes.

Another idea is Halloween candy map. So for these we do it with M&Ms and Skittles, because I mean, there is like candy corn, but it’s not as easy to get like different colors with that. So M&Ms and Skittles are my go to for that. You can do counting activities with these so students can count like you give them a bag of M&Ms or Skittles. And you see how many do they have of each color. And then with that they can compare like which one has more, which one has less and you can do even the little alligators. In our worksheets, we even have ones where the alligators that have a wit chat. It’s super cute. You can have them graph how many is in each one. And for younger kids like the really littles I might just be even like they have a page that’s like a graph. But then you like just stack the candy. It’s like they make stacks, and then they can see visibly, which ones have the most which ones have the least and you can talk about it with the older kids that might create a graph with the key. So you just differentiate it depending on your children’s needs. For older children, you can do fractions and probability. For younger children, you can have them do addition and subtraction with adding the blue and the green together. So there’s so much you can do with math with candy. And we have themed Halloween ones that you can use as well. And with that we even have Mad Libs so we include some language arts too. You know, for most of them, it’s just like a normal Mad Lib or like I guess we call it fill in the blank because Mad Lib was trademarked. So they would select like nouns, adjectives, whatever, but then we have some blinks that say color and for that they close their eyes and they pick out a color and the color of that candy goes on to the story. And then for writing, we even have them write about creating their own Halloween candy. So if you’re a member of Wife Teacher Mommy club, be sure to grab those candy Math Worksheets. We’ll also link to those for individual purchase too.

Okay, another fun thing to do is have a Halloween spelling list. So instead of your normal spelling list for the week, just come up with some fun words depending on your kids level that have to do with Halloween. So you might have like vampire or pumpkin or Jack-o-lantern, skeleton, cat, bat, obviously depends on your children’s levels. But it’s fun to have a list or at least some of your words be Halloween themed. So just mix it up a little bit. So number one was Halloween boo. Number two is candy math. Number three is Halloween is spelling.

Number four is Halloween alphabet and numbers. So you can have the students come up with something for each letter of the alphabet that has to do with Halloween. And they can just like say this out loud or whatever, if they’re not able to write it themselves or create a cute little book. You can also do this with numbers, have them practice tracing or writing their numbers. And then they can draw like you know, say the number is two they like trace and write the number two. And then you have them draw two cats or two pumpkins or something to do with Halloween. And again, for all these things I’m mentioning we have resources that I’m linking in the show notes when I’m also trying to make this episode relevant whether or not you choose to use these resources too. So just want to share these those kind of ideas as well.

So number five is Halloween directed drawing. And this would work best if you were a great artist yourself, but you could show the students. Okay, this is the first step for drawing a cat. Okay, here’s the next step. And if you’re not a good artist like me, I’m not the best artist in the world. I will admit that I have other strengths. Drawing is not one of them. I love stick figures. So if you are like me, we do have directed drawings available in the club or available for individual purchase too.

The next one is Halloween I Spy and this is technically this is part of our growing bundle we have going on right now. So with these, they get to look through and find the number of items in the picture. So it’s like there’ll be a picture with all these different items. was like gonna find how many cats that are how many pumpkins, how many skeletons or jack-o-lanterns. So they write those out. And then for the younger kids that just count them, that’s what they do. For older kids, that becomes our key to then complete other math problems. So they might be doing addition, they might be doing subtraction, or they might be doing missing value, or multiplication. So there are different options for that. And I will link to all of those growing bundles in the show notes. If you grab the growing bundle now, if you’re listening in September, you’ll get the October sets for free plus the whole rest of the year. So definitely check that out.

Okay, number seven is reading passages. So finding reading content, whether that’s books or passages, or whatever that have to do with Halloween, it’s so fun to tie your reading selections into the holidays. And we do have these available in our monthly reading passage growing bundles so you can check those out. But also, there are some awesome books out there, I would recommend going to your library and checking out some of the books for Halloween. Some really popular ones on Amazon right now are Creepy Carrots, Snowman at Halloween, we love the snowman books. And those ones are so fun because you can tie Halloween into it. And honestly, we love Spookley at our house, there’s that’s just such a cute story. And it was a book before it was a TV show. So I would recommend checking that one out too. Just finding different books that tie in to Halloween is such a fun way to bring in this spirit of Halloween to the classroom, or your homeschool if you’re one of our homeschool moms or dads.

Okay, next number eight, I’m going to talk about a few other ideas. And all of these can be found in our October sub plans or homeschool lessons. So one idea that I love is having students write either an opinion or persuasive writing piece about Halloween candy. So what Halloween candy is the best and why. And for younger students, you could just give them two options and have them like fill in the blank of a sentence. So like the best candy is blank, and then they draw a picture. Very, very simple. And then you can go all the way up to like, you know, having them just write their opinion like, oh, this candy is the best because whatever. And then for older children, when you get into upper upper, like sixth grade, you might have them write persuasively like, hey, this candy is the best and here’s why. And you’re trying to persuade them why this candy is so much better than the other candy. And you can do so many different prompts having to do with Halloween. So candy is one of my favorites, though.

Another is incorporating Halloween board games into your classroom too. And we have some of these in those sub plans and homeschool lessons. So you just have to buy like a simple file and then you can print out the game as many times as you need. So we have one that’s called Along Came a Spider and it’s a math board game. So be sure to check those out. I will link to them in the show notes. Okay, so number eight was our Halloween candy opinion or persuasive writing number nine was Halloween board games.

And the final one number 10. And I think I got a little bit ahead of myself and I mentioned it before. But one of my favorite absolute favorite activities that we have in any of our resources for holidays, is like comparing numbers with the adorable little crocodiles with the witch hats. So for the youngest children, you’ll just compare the numbers. And then as they get older, you can have addition problems, subtraction problems, fractions, different comparisons, depending on their level. But it’s just so fun because it has the little witch hats they’re the crocodiles, and it’s just my favorite, so I would recommend checking those out.

So I hope you got some great ideas from this episode. And as always, we have resources available for all of these everything I mentioned today, so I will link to those in the show notes. So if you’re already a member, go on and download all of them make good use of that club membership. If not, they’re all available for individual purchase on our website and on Teachers Pay Teachers and some are even on Etsy too. But don’t forget, if you would like to join us in the club, we have a new one time discount for podcast listeners. Just use the coupon code podcast10 to save 10% off your first payment to the club. It’s my little thank you to you. So just go to wifeteachermommyclub.com to check that out. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. And leaving a review of this podcast would mean the world to me as well. It really helps podcasters when you share with your friends and leave a review. So stay tuned for Friday’s episode. I have an incredible guest and children’s book author who will be here on the podcast I think cannot wait for you to hear from her. Talk to you then.