27 Frightfully Fun Halloween Activities for Schools

In this blog, you will learn:

• 27 frightfully fun Halloween activities for schools.
• How to find and apply for the best education and SEND jobs.

Get ready to transform your classroom into a spook-tacular haven of learning! Halloween is the perfect time to engage students in creative and educational activities that challenge, excite and educate.

From eerie science experiments to gory games, these frightfully fun activities are sure to get your school into the Halloween spirit. Discover what you can do to trick or treat your students this Halloween in this guide to enjoying the scary season.

27 frightfully fun Halloween activities for schools

Fun Halloween school activities include: 

• Decorate the classroom.
• Trick or treat in the classroom.
• Carve pumpkins.
• Cook a pumpkin.
• Start a Halloween treasure hunt.
• A broom and pumpkin race.
• Tell a spooky story.
• Play the mummy wrap game.
• Play eyeball games.
• Dress to scare.
• Discover the skeleton-human body.
• Paint rocks and leaves.
• Bowl with ghosts.
• Recreate a Halloween tale.
• Play pumpkin and sticks.
• Learn all things spiders.
• Guess the ghost.
• Host Halloween bingo.
• Create a creepy quiz.
• Do spider equations.
• Play crazy scary golf.
• Make giant Halloween puzzles.
• Teach students about the meaning of Halloween.
• Cook up some potions.
• Build a model haunted house.
• Bob for apples.
• Do a thrilling dance.

Decorate the classroom

The first step to get into the Halloween spirit is to decorate the classroom and make it a little scary! Get students involved and ask them to make decorations, from paper spiders and bats, to bunting. Why not even decorate the classroom door with a white sheet and some ghost eyes?

Using paper, toilet roll, card and other recyclable materials, your students can transform the classroom, but don’t make it too haunting, you don’t want to scare your students away from school.

You could even enhance the Halloween festivities in the classroom by renaming your groups into ‘tricksters,’ ‘ghosts,’ and ‘witches,’ to get everyone in the Halloween team spirit.

Trick or treat in the classroom

Halloween can be challenging for some children who are sensitive, anxious or don’t like the attention, change in routine or the scare factor. For those students and those who haven't been trick or treating, why not try it in the classroom first?

Teach students how to politely and confidently take part in trick or treating in a role play situation. Reverse the roles, with some students answering the door and giving out treats, and others playing the trick or treaters.

Students that struggle to communicate or interact in social situations, could benefit from scenarios like this.

Carve pumpkins

It wouldn’t be Halloween without the classic pumpkin carving tradition. In teams, encourage students to get creative and carve pumpkins. You could ask students to bring in their own carved pumpkins, and if carving isn’t an option, paint a pumpkin instead!

Why not raise the stakes and make it into a competition? Crown the fastest, the funniest and the silliest pumpkin designs. Encourage students to get creative with their designs and really push the boundaries. Perhaps they could carve a message, or their favourite characters or historical figures, with extra points for likeness!

Cook a pumpkin

With the leftover pumpkin flesh from your carving competition, why not make some yummy Halloween-themed food? There are many recipes that use pumpkin including pumpkin pie, soup, curry and even pumpkin pie cookies! Teaching cooking in the classroom helps students develop skills in food handling and an understanding of nutrition, healthy eating, and food safety.

You could also use the seeds from the pumpkin to make a bird feeder to attract wildlife to the school grounds. Students can observe the birds that the seeds attract and help identify them and their habitat. 

Start a Halloween treasure hunt

A Halloween-themed treasure hunt is a scarily good way to get your students excited about the spooky season. Prepare the classroom by hiding tricks and treats (small pumpkins, spiders, ghosts and more) in obscure places. Then leave some clues or organise a quiz for students to uncover where to find the treats, and avoid the tricks.

Even better, if the weather is on your side, take the Halloween hunt outdoors. Treasure hunts can be great for teaching students about teamwork, improving problem solving skills and keeping their brains and their bodies active.

A broom and pumpkin race

Gather your brooms and a few small pumpkins, split the class into teams, and watch them race to see who can push the pumpkin across the finish line first. A friendly but competitive game of witch's hockey or a relay race is the perfect Halloween game to get students active and in the festive spirit.

Players must take it in turns sweeping a small pumpkin across the room and ride the broomstick back again. They must then pass the broomstick to the next person in their team. The first team to sweep all of their pumpkins into the goal or across the finish lines wins.

If the weather permits it, take the game outside, so students can really have fun and let off some steam.

Tell a spooky story

What’s Halloween without a few spooky stories? Put your students' creative writing skills to the test and encourage them to write some frightening Halloween themed stories or poems. Centre a lesson around the importance of using descriptive language, emotive speech and suspense of course their imagination to write a successfully spooky story.

It doesn’t just have to be stories of ghosts and haunted houses, as long as students use their imagination. Some creative writing prompts include answering ‘what is your favourite Halloween costume and why?’ and ‘if you could create your own monster, what would it be like?’

Play the mummy wrap game

Another Halloween activity to get students moving and working together, the mummy wrap game is fun for everyone involved. In a race against time, students must wrap their fellow classmate in toilet roll without breaking it. The most mummified, wins!

Working in teams, students must use their communication and teamwork skills to win. Encourage students to think about their wrapping strategy because if their toilet roll breaks they automatically lose, so they need to be quick but careful. 

You could even play a Halloween song and use the duration of the song as a timer. 

Play eyeball games

There are many Halloween games you can organise in the classroom using plastic eyeballs from an eyeball hunt to blowing eyeballs across the table. Start by painting eyes on ping pong balls and allow them to dry. If you don’t have a ping pong table, set up plastic cups with an aim to bounce the eyeballs into the cups.

Another Halloween activity to get students to work as a team and think on their feet is an eyeball and spoon relay race. The goal is to walk across the classroom and back again while balancing an eyeball on a spoon - without dropping it. Then pass on to the next person and repeat until the whole team has completed the terrifying task.

Dress to scare

It wouldn’t be Halloween without fancy dress and scary costumes. A spooktacular Halloween costume is the best way to get anyone into the Halloween spirit. Why not explore different fancy dress ideas? As well as scary and spooky costumes, you could dress up as historical figures, sports stars or even role models.

Like with most non-uniform days, ask students to pay £1 or £2 which you can donate to a charity or put towards a prize for the best dressed. If students are already in fancy dress at school, they are ready to start trick or treating as soon as the bell rings and the school day is over.

Discover the skeleton-human body

Skeletons aren't just for Halloween, but the spooky season does provide Teachers with the perfect opportunity to teach students about the human skeleton, body parts and muscles. Take advantage of the time and put a fun twist on your typical biology lesson by combining skulls and skeletons with science.

Paint rocks and leaves

Painting rocks and leaves is a quick and easy task to keep up the Halloween spirit and help with the seasonal decor. Why not get your students outside on a nature trail of the school grounds or to a local park and collect some rocks and leaves? 

Students can get crafty by painting leaves black, adding eyes and wings to make bats, or painting leaves white to make ghosts!  

Hang them on string from the ceiling so they appear to be flying around the classroom!

Bowl with ghosts

You could bowl in the classroom safely with ghostly pins and pumpkin bowling balls. Fill empty plastic bottles with cotton balls to make them look like bowling pins and then get ready to bowl! Add some eyes to animate your ghost pins and focus your aim for a strike.

Students can have fun knocking down the ghosts pins and keeping a tally of the scores and the number of pins they knock down on each turn. Toilet roll is also a great alternative to bowling pins and can be stacked into a pyramid and knocked down safely.

Recreate a Halloween tale

Why not choose a classic Halloween story and read it to students in the classroom? Sit down for some quiet reading and listening time or give your students the opportunity to read to the rest of the class to test their reading skills, enhance their speaking skills and improve their confidence.

Scary stories about monsters, witches, haunted houses and ghosts are also perfect to reenact, so why not add some drama and encourage the class to perform their favourite Halloween stories/plays and poems?

Play pumpkin and sticks

Time to test your pupils mathematical skills and see what they know with a fun Halloween activity. Label some mini pumpkin bowls with a number, and write some equations on wooden craft sticks. Students need to work out the calculations on the sticks and place them into the correct pumpkin.

This is a great opportunity to see how your students are performing in maths, and encourages class discussion when it comes to working out the right answer. Students learn better when they self-explain and verbalise their answers, and other students can also benefit from peer-teaching opportunities. 

Learn all things spiders

Get creepy and crawly, with a science lesson about spiders. Halloween is the perfect time to learn about creepy crawlies and especially the many features and diet of a spider.

Make it more exciting, why not make webs with pupils using white chalk, string or straws on black paper and discuss the intricacies of a web. 

You could take it one step further by going on an insect hunt or invite a specialist organisation to bring some of their creepy crawlies into school. This is a great way to help visual learners discover more about different environments and ecosystems while holding a real spider.

Guess the ghost

Get your students guessing with a silly game of guess the ghost - perfect for Halloween. Sit the children in a circle, put on some spooky music and choose one student to walk around the circle blindfolded, touching the other children’s heads. 

When the music stops, the person who has been chosen must let out their best ghostly wail. It is up to the other student to guess who it is. If they guess correctly, the swap places. If they’re wrong, they go around the circle again.

Host Halloween bingo

There’s nothing like a game of bingo to get students excited. Bingo is a fun and easy game to play for children at any age. Instead of numbers, use Halloween images (think pumpkins, ghosts and witches) and if your students get a line or house, get the winner to shout ‘Binghost.’ 

Teachers can even encourage students to make their own bingo cards for more creativity.

Bingo is a great way to improve students' letter and number recognition and develop their oral language development and communication skills.

Create a creepy quiz

Why not host a Halloween quiz, testing your students' knowledge on skeletons, spiders and Halloween characters? Students could even learn how to identify and pronounce different Halloween words in different languages for a point for their team.

Why not use some of the Halloween activities in this blog within your quiz to engage and motivate students to think and act productively?

Do spider equations

Practice maths and get crafty with some homemade spider equations. Make spiders out of paper with a circle in the middle for the body and face and eight legs. Write a number or equation in the circle and encourage students to write more equations on each of the legs that are equal to it.

Students need to think of 8 alternative sums and test their problem solving and mathematical skills. This is a useful activity to help students practise and check their maths skills and think of multiple different ways to work out these equations.

Play crazy scary golf

Why not play a do-it-yourself Halloween game of golf in the classroom but with a pumpkin? Carve a hole in a pumpkin, take aim and use it as your goal. Each student can take it in turns and aim for a hole in one. 

A round of Halloween golf is a fun way for all students to take a break from eating sweets and scaring each other, giving everyone a moment to be patient, supportive and respectful to each other.

Make giant Halloween puzzles

Puzzles have many benefits including improving concentration, enhancing visual perception and problem-solving. Children love word searches and crosswords, so why not throw in a giant Halloween themed puzzle for the class?

Make a giant word search or crossword and put it on display with the rest of the Halloween decorations. Working as a team, the whole class should contribute to solving the giant, scary puzzle before it's too late! 

Teach students about the meaning of Halloween

It wouldn’t be school without a lesson or two, and the history behind Halloween is an exciting story for students. Discover the origins behind Halloween dating back to the Celtic times, explore the Salem witch trials and discuss different Halloween traditions in different countries to allow students to appreciate other cultures, ideologies and values.

Cook up some potions

Why not turn your classroom into a lab and swap those test tubes for cauldrons and experiment? A fantastic way to combine science and Halloween is to make fizzing, bubbling and magical potions. 

From designing the labels, to considering how different chemicals react with each other, encourage students to experiment with different ingredients and make some enchanting potions any witch would be proud of.

You could fill some empty jars or glass bottles with different chemicals and elements and see how they react. Just be careful those potions are kept secure, you never know what spell you might cast!

Build a model haunted house

Why not set your students the ultimate Halloween project, and encourage them to build their own model haunted house?

Using a shoebox as the base of the haunted house, encourage students to 

include features such as houses and windows and of course add some spooky guests like ghosts, monsters and spiders! Make some cobwebs and spiders out of paper or string and add some terror to your haunted house.

Bob for apples

A game traditionally played at Halloween, apple bobbing involves students trying to pick up apples floating in a bowl of water using only their teeth. The fastest player to dunk their head and remove their apple without using their hands, wins!

This annual tradition is quick, fun for all and harder than it looks. Plus with all of the leftover apples, every student can have a healthy snack after the game. But why not add a bit of a twist? Make it a bit scarier by adding red colouring so the water resembles blood.

Do a thrilling dance

Why not end the Halloween school day with a dance? You could recreate Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, or do the Time Warp from the Rocky Horror Picture Show?! While students, Teachers and Teaching Assistants are dressed spookily, it's the perfect time to take advantage with a dance performance.

Dancing is a great way to keep students active, improve balance and coordination, and it’s even more thrilling when you combine it with Halloween costumes and music.

Check out how we’ve celebrated Halloween at Spencer Clarke Group over the years from our recreation of the iconic Thriller dance to a scarefest to make you wonder whether you are you afraid of the clarke.

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