27 Scary Fun Halloween Crafts, Activities and Games for Elementary Schoolers
Roll in the pumpkins and go batty for bats. It’s time for Halloween activities in the classroom! If you’re looking for Halloween art projects for your elementary students, games themed around pumpkins and witches, or maybe some Halloween-themed activities that are more in line with the subjects you’re actually teaching, we’ve got you.
The Teach Starter teacher team pulled together a few of their favorite Halloween art projects, Halloween activities that will help students practice writing skills, Halloween math activities, and more … plus some Halloween activities for your students that are just plain fun!
Ready to do math with pumpkins, create creepy stories, and more curriculum-aligned Halloween hijinks?
Halloween Art Projects for Elementary
Let’s kick things off with everyone’s favorite — the fun stuff! These are some of our favorite Halloween art projects to do with the elementary school set, and we added a few teacher tips to add an educational element.
Hanging Bat Craft
Save up your toilet paper rolls to create hanging bats for the classroom. As well as creating a spooky Halloween classroom display, they are a great starting point for a classroom discussion about animal behavior and what it means to be nocturnal.This can also open the door to writing an animal information report! For example, challenge your students to find out why it is that bats hang upside down.
Print these bat resources to use for Halloween or any time of the school year!
Halloween Page-Biter Bookmarks
Does your district frown on giving out candy for Halloween? Send your students home with these fun printable Halloween bookmarks instead, so they can take a bite out of reading fun!
Making these Halloween Page Biter bookmarks is fun and easy.
- Download and print the Halloween Page Biters template.
- Decorate the bookmark of choice.
- Cut along the outside dashed lines and cut out the hole for the mouth.
- Use the page biter’s mouth to sit as a bookmark over the top of a page.
Q-Tip Skeleton
They’re spooky, and they’re scary, but skeletons are a big part of Halloween! This easy Halloween craft activity requires very little planning and preparation but creates an impressive Halloween art piece to take home! Grab Q-Tips (or cotton swabs) from the dollar store, some black construction paper, and make Q-tip skeletons.You can add a math element to this art project too — as a class, explore symmetry and angles!
Teach Starter Teacher Tip: Use eco-friendly Q-tips with paper stems or cut up straws to make your skeletons (and keep it green with paper versions!).
Build a Skeleton
Want to upgrade the cotton swab skeleton to something more life-like? Our teacher team created this fun Halloween skeleton resource that’s ready to be printed and assembled with some simple brass brads — then mounted on your classroom bulletin board!
Funky Pumpkin
Need a printable Halloween activity with a little less mess and a little less work involved? Introducing our zentangle Funky Pumpkin! The printable pumpkin templates include glasses and other accessories for your students to deck out their paper pumpkins.
Funky pumpkins are also a great art project for teaching about patterns and lines:
Funky Cat
Steer your students away from those myths about black cats with a funky Halloween cat art project. Just like the funky pumpkin, this Halloween printable comes with purrfect accessories like a witch’s hat!
For more Halloween cat fun, try these black cat resources:
Halloween Hand and Foot Print Art
Put a Halloween twist on this popular preschool and kindergarten art project. Students use their hands and feet to create prints that can be decorated into one of many spooky Halloween characters like vampires, monsters, ghosts, and pumpkins.
Roll to Create a Haunted House
Make drawing a haunted house extra fun with a “roll to create” that will make this house extra kooky.
- Download and print the Roll to Create a Haunted House worksheet.
- Students roll their dice and find the corresponding house and yard features on the chart.
- Each time they identify an element, they add it to their haunted house drawing.
Explore our entire “roll to create” resource collection for more ideas for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and other holidays!
Halloween ELA Activities
A Book A Day Halloween Bulletin Board
Keep the monsters at bay — and build a cool Halloween bulletin board that can stay up long after the holiday is over with this fun way for students to write about the books they’re reading! Print the bulletin board set here!
Feed the Monster Game
Do you know what monsters love to eat most of all? In this Halloween phonics game, it’s graphemes! Print the monster face feeding posters, and the accompanying flashcards for use in your reading centers.
Roll to Create a Halloween Story
Use this Roll a Story game to get students started on a fun Halloween creative writing task!
- Download and print the Roll to Create a Halloween Story worksheet.
- Students roll the dice and identify the corresponding narrative elements on the chart.
- Each narrative element is recorded at the bottom of the sheet.
- Once students have “rolled” the characters, setting, and complications for their story they can begin to write their narrative.
Bonus: Print a Halloween-themed writing page for your students to display their work.
Halloween Phonics Fortune Teller
Create a simple phonics game by writing Halloween-related vocabulary on pumpkin, mummy, and bat fortune teller templates.
Break the words up into syllables, blends, and digraphs.
Halloween Math Activities
Cast a spell on your little mathematicians with these frightfully fun Halloween math activities!
Make a Pumpkin Geoboard
Geoboards are excellent learning tools for exploring basic concepts such as perimeter, area, and the characteristics of polygons.You will need:
- a small pumpkin
- push pins
- colorful rubber bands
How to Make a Pumpkin Geoboard:
- Press push pins into the skin of a pumpkin, and provide your students with brightly colored rubber bands.
- Remind your students that a polygon is any 2-dimensional shape formed with straight lines.
- Demonstrate how to secure the rubber bands around the pins to create polygons.
- Encourage your students to work with a partner or a small group to explore different polygons.
Use our Types of Triangles Poster, and head to our 2-D Shapes Learning Area for teaching resources to scaffold learning.
Measure the Circumference of a Pumpkin
This fun and simple Halloween activity can easily be adapted to fit any grade level. For the primary grades, focus on informal units of measure, and for the older grades, use a measuring tape. Extend student learning by converting measurements, comparing and finding the difference between pumpkins, and graphing your results!
You will need:
- one or more pumpkins of varying size
- ribbon or string
- paper clips
- measuring tape
Explain to your students that a circle or sphere’s circumference is the distance around it. For a rich learning experience, be sure to ask open-ended questions and build in class discussion. For example, ask:
- How could we measure the circumference of the pumpkin?
- What challenges might we face?
- How do measurements vary and compare?
- Why do the results vary?
Measure Pumpkin Capacity
Students often find it hard to estimate the capacity of containers, and the best way to develop knowledge and understanding of this tricky concept is through hands-on learning. So, this Halloween, why not estimate, measure, and compare the capacity of pumpkins! You will want to make sure that your students know the difference between volume and capacity before you begin this activity. Also, don’t forget to explore how containers of different shapes can have the same capacity!
Measuring the Mass of a Pumpkin
Use a balance scale to compare the masses of small pumpkins or pumpkin portions. Encourage your students to determine whether the pumpkin’s mass is more, less, or about the same.
For the older grades, use a bathroom scale to measure a whole pumpkin’s mass and encourage your students to convert to another measurement unit. Use our Converting Customary Units of Measurement Posters as a scaffold for students who may need it. Head to our Measurement collection for teaching resources to use when your students learn about measurement units, including length, mass, and volume.
Halloween Number Puzzles
Perfect for little learners who are still learning numerical order, these number order puzzles use witches, pumpkins, and more for a Halloween twist on the game!
Spider Symmetry
The eight legs on a spider might make them scary for many folks, but it also makes them absolutely perfect for symmetry lessons! This spider symmetry grid is the perfect way to add a taste of the Halloween holiday to your lesson that’s not too spooky!
As an extension activity, have students determine the fraction, decimal, and percentage of each color, or write the colors as ratios.
Number Sentence Fortune Tellers
Grab the mummy, bat, and pumpkin fortune tellers for some mental math strategy fun! Write number sentences on the inside of the fortune teller, and pair students off to use mental math to calculate the answers.
As an alternative math game, explore and measure the angles of the fortune teller.
2D Monster Puppets
Explore 2-D shapes … but make it monstrously fun with monster puppets that help them get a sense of hexagons, squares, and more (while playing Monster Mash on Spotify, perhaps?).
3D Halloween Creatures
Don’t let the two-dimensional creatures take all the attention. Try these creepy printable 3D creatures to explore cones, cylinders, and more shapes.
Halloween Graphing
This quick activity makes the perfect graphing lesson! Count the Halloween illustrations and create a tally chart on the Search and Find – Halloween worksheet. Then, have your students create a graph to display their data. A great extension activity could be to have your students generate questions using information from their graphs for a partner to answer.
Are you ready for Halloween? See our complete holiday resource collection for more spooky good fun for the classroom!
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