Looking for fun Halloween activities for middle schoolers? You’re in the right place! Here, we’ll explore some hands-on activities for Halloween with lots of opportunities to learn about other cultures.
Whether it’s Samhain in Ireland, El Dia De Los Muertos in the Americas, or Kawasaki in Japan, you can use these activities to dive into global events and spooky scenarios. Enjoy creating space to unleash your students’ creativity!
Monsters From Around the World
Get your students to research monsters from around the world. Not only will this activity invite students to explore their heritage, but it will open up a fascinating world to all learners. They can produce posters for a great multicultural gallery, and “displaying children’s work lets them know you value it.” In order to ensure we are maximising the learning in this activity, I follow the steps below:
- Ask students to brainstorm monsters they know of. This could be a quick activity where students simply make a list and share it. Alternatively, it could be gamified with students being asked to write the alphabet down one side of their page. They then try to think of a monster for each letter. Set a time limit and whoever has the most at the end wins. Do it in teams or make it cooperative where it’s the whole class against the clock!
- Next, provide resources for students to research monsters from around the world. If you can book a library session, this is a great opportunity to get them into a different space and using print resources. If Internet access is available, review finding reliable sources online with this free workshop. Either way, allow time for students to find information from quality sources.
- As the students research the monsters, they might also include some information about the country and culture their choices originate from.
- Remind students to keep track of their sources using whatever method is common practice in your classroom e.g. notecards (offline) or digital bibliography builders.
- Finally, have students put it all together to create a poster featuring their monster. To promote a growth mindset, and harness the power of feedback, consider showing ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ to promote effective peer assessment and higher quality posters.
Check the suitability of the websites below before sharing with your students, but they make a great starting point for identifying creatures from around the world:
- Infographic on 40 monsters from around the world with a little information on each to get your learners started
- Every country’s most famous mythical creatures presented in beautiful individual illustrations (collective example below)
Halloween Podcast for Teens and Tweens
Gen Z have an 8-part podcast for teens called The Hollow. Here’s the blurb from their site:
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” The Hollow is a modern take on the timeless story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. When three 6th graders at Sleepy Hollow Middle School stumble upon a real-life ghost story, they find themselves on the trail of the Headless Horseman himself. Is he truly a terrifying ghoul, or has he been misunderstood for all these years?
With only 8 episodes spanning just under 2 hours, this could easily supplement 2 weeks of learning or more.
Some students do better with an activity while listening, so I provide my students with one of my podcast graphic organizers. Grab the pack for free by joining our teacher tribe, or get it here.
And the fun doesn’t end there! I took the transcript from the first episode of The Hollow and removed the line breaks. Taking out some other unnecessary words such as character names, I created a full page of text that we can use for blackout poetry (aka found poetry).
If your students enjoy this podcast, here are some more spook-tacular Halloweeen podcasts for teens and tweens:
- The Weirdness – a fun story podcast incorporating mythical and legendary monsters
- Unspookable – half hour, family-friendly scary stories, myths and urban legends
- The Creeping Hour – 15 to 20 minute episodes; this series is about three friends who ended up turning into monsters after listening to one too many creepy tales
A Short Story by Neil Gaiman
Click Clack the Rattlebag is a delightfully creepy tale. Watch Neil Gaiman read it aloud in this 10-minute video.
Clearly the uploaders weren’t thinking of our English language learners because the video has no subtitles or captions. However, you can download a PDF of the text here and translate it using Google’s document translator.
As you play the video, you can stop it at intervals and ask questions, such as:
- 0.19 – What do you think the relationship between the characters is?
- 0.59 – What word might you use to describe the speaker?
- 1.30 – Who do you think ‘she’ might be?
This is a simple way to keep the students engaged and do some quick formative checks on their comprehension and skills for making inferences. If you’d prefer to listen to the story all the way through and then provide some structures for analysis, these reading task cards might be just what you need. (Added bonus- you can reuse them again and again with any text.)
While Gaiman’s story is certainly brief, we can do even briefer stories with this next find…
Two Sentence Horror Stories
Much like Poe’s 6-word story that spawned an Internet sensation, Bored Panda’s challenge inspires writers to create a chilling story in just 2 sentences. There are ample examples to send a shiver down your students’ spines, such as this one:
This quick activity could be done at any time during class, but here are some other ideas for how to make the most of the students’ creativity:
NARRATIVE WRITING
- Students write their stories onto a slip of paper.
- All the papers are put into a box and students randomly select one.
- They then write a longer (one-page?) story incorporating the 2 sentences as they are written.
- Students share their stories alongside the original ‘prompts’ either orally (perhaps using Flipgrid) or written and displayed (more time). Why not compile them into a creepy anthology to share with other classes within or across schools or even across countries?
DRAMA PERFORMANCE
Students use the sentence stories to improvise a short scene and bring the story to life. This could be done with or without dialogue. My Drama class is doing an exploration of puppetry so any kind of animation would work too.
Providing an authentic audience such as younger students or the wider school community might motivate students to put their best effort into it. One of the great aspects of this is students could also bring in other languages and contexts to include windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. After all, every culture has equivalent concepts of ‘horror’ and ‘ghosts’.
CREATE AN EYE-CATCHING DISPLAY
Use a template (such as a skull outline like the one below) for students to record their stories. These can be used for a bulletin board display, strung together to make a low-hanging banner along a wall, or – my favourite – put on the back of toilet doors so people can enjoy them while doing their business: captive audience!
Encourage students to add their own embellishments, perhaps using the eye sockets for images related to the story or adding a border made of spooky images.
Printing them on coloured paper will make them look even better.
Get the printable and digital templates free by clicking here (with access to a vault of additional resources) or download them from my store here.
Highs schoolers might prefer to be directed toward a free image site such as Pixabay to find an image they can superimpose their stories onto using a free app like Google Draw or Fotor.
Halloween Breakout or Escape Room Puzzle
Deck Toys is a cool app that allows you to create a series of puzzles that lead to the completion of the game. They are like digital escape rooms or breakout rooms. Students can work individually or together to solve this Halloween-themed puzzle. Click on the image to check it out .
Looking for more escape rooms? Check out these 3 free games from Ditch That Textbook here.
Zombie Literacy
I created a suite of zombie-themed literacy activities for middle schoolers a few years ago. They continue to be among my most popular resources.
Whether it’s reading, writing, speaking, or speaking and listening, I’ve got you covered. Check out the gallery for my free and low-cost zombie timesavers and visit the store here.
So, whether you’re here for the month of October, to kick off a horror genre unit with your middle schoolers or high school students, or just have some spooky fun with your learners, hopefully you found something useful.
Fun Halloween activities for middle schoolers and up?
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