Are you looking for some fun Halloween language arts activities to do for this holiday? Then you’re in the right place! I love celebrating the holidays of English-speaking countries with my students. I think it teaches them about culture while also providing a fun topic to practice the target language in. Students always enjoy these activities!
There’s a lot you can do when you use Halloween as a topic. From reading and listening to speaking and writing, plus vocabulary, and then you can make anything Halloween themed! Below I will tell you about some of the Halloween class activities that I do with my groups. Maybe you won’t have time to do everything, but then you can pick and choose what you’d like to do with your kiddos. Check it out!
Want a preview of these fun Halloween activities? Grab these free discussion cards for Halloween by clicking here, to get students to talk about the holiday that is Halloween in a fun way!
Halloween language activities
I love to start off my Halloween ELA activities with some speaking practice. For this purpose, I made a set of discussion cards all about this holiday! Students will sit in small groups, and each small group will receive a set of cards, and they must discuss each question on the cards in these groups. This will warm them up to the topic as well as get their language skills flowing. Plus, it’s good for fluency, and you can gauge what they already know about the topic of Halloween.
Next, I enjoy discussing some Halloween vocabulary with students. This will help them talk about the holiday with some useful words. I have a fun Halloween worksheet or a set of task cards that will help them match words with their pictures, which you can do together with them. And then I have dominoes and memory games that also ask students to match the pictures with the Halloween words. These are super fun ways to practice Halloween-y vocabulary with your kiddos.
Halloween activities for middle school language arts
What I love to do with my middle school students especially is do some writing! Writing scary stories is something that students really enjoy! Some of them have all the creativity, and you only have to tell them: write a scary story. Others need a bit of prompting. That’s why I have three types of writing prompts.
One is a roll-the-dice sheet, for which students must roll the dice to get four prompts: a character, a setting, an object, and an exclamation. Then I have photo prompts, which contain mysterious depictions that could help students think of scary stories. And then I have image prompts for which I made cards with pictures on them of characters, settings, and objects. These writing prompts are equally good for prompting students to write so I usually have students choose which one they want to use!
You can grab these writing prompts from my store. If you click here, you can see all of them. Or you could come up with them yourself, it’s not hard.
Halloween language arts activities: Reading and listening
Then of course there’s reading and listening. You can get students to read an article, depending on their level of English, or to watch a video. Possible articles are this one by History, this article by Brittanica, or the one from British Council with comprehension tasks. These are higher level articles. Or use this one by 5 Minute English that is much easier and contains a little quiz too.
Possible videos are this one by English Portal, which is at A1-A2 level; this video by LingPortal, or this one by National Geographic.
Two of the articles have exercises included. For the ones that don’t, you might want to create your own set of questions. Use the W + H question words to get you started (who, what, when, where, why, and how). Or get students to come up with questions for their classmates. That’s always a fun task too! Get them to think of questions, write them on a sheet, without giving the answers, and pass the sheet to a classmate for them to answer. It’s easy for you and fun for them!
Halloween themed language arts activities
You can also transform some regular ELA activities into Halloween themed ones. For example, I was discussing adjectives last year at the end of October, and so I created an Adjectives worksheet about Halloween-y words. My students really enjoyed it, and it was so easy to do. Check out my example here!
Some other Halloween activities for school that can be fun and I have done before include:
- Dressing up as our favorite monster from a book or movie and talking or writing to each other about it
- Creating our own monster out of clay and talking and writing to each other about it
- Drawing our own monster on big posters and presenting them to the group
- Me decorating the room with Halloween objects and decorations, and students writing or talking about what each one means or means to them
Giving students things to do that require them to use all of their language skills will help them learn the English language better, as well as learn so much about this holiday. It’s invaluable information and practice of skills that they will truly enjoy. My students do! Can’t wait for Halloween this year!
If you want a fast way to do all these activities without creating them from scratch,
I have a bundle of them up in my TPT store. Click here to check out all the goodness!
Related articles:
Top 3 Halloween writing prompts that students will love
Why these are the best autumn activities for ESL students
How to successfully teach a Thanksgiving lesson
