5 spooky ideas for your primary classes this Halloween

Joanna Wiseman
Children in halloween costumes stood in a hallway with a adult

It’s almost Halloween, and the ghosts and vampires will soon be coming out to play. Did you know that although we often associate Halloween with pumpkin carving and eating candy, the festival has much older origins?

is an ancient Gaelic festival that celebrates the end of the harvest and the start of winter. This is why people often associate the colors of orange and black with Halloween: orange is the color many leaves turn in autumn and black is the color of the darker winter months.

People used to believe that spirits walked the Earth on the night of Samhain. The tradition of dressing up as ghosts and demons started as a way to hide from the spirits who walked the streets. Similarly, people used to leave treats outside their houses for the spirits and from this came the tradition of trick-or-treating.

So to help get your younger students in the Halloween spirit, here are five spooky ideas to try in your primary classes.

1. ‘Pumpkin’ oranges

Pumpkin carving is fun - but it’s also messy and pumpkins can be really heavy. Instead, bring in an orange for each student and give them a black marker pen. Get them to draw a scary face on their orange and then write a short text describing it.

My pumpkin orange, Ghoulie, has two big eyes. He’s got a small nose and a big mouth, with lots of teeth. This Halloween, he’s going to sit outside my house. He’s going to scare people but he doesn’t scare me. I think he’s very funny.

2. Bat fishing

This is a great way to practice questions and review language with your younger students. Have your students cut out bat shapes on card and tell them to write a question on the back of each one. They can write personal information questions, such as ‘What do you eat for breakfast?’ or questions related to topics you’re studying at the moment, like ‘How do you spell dinosaur?’

Attach a paper clip to each bat and put them on the floor, with the questions face down. Then attach a magnet to a piece of string.

Divide the class into teams and have students take turns to fish a bat from the floor. When they catch a bat using the magnet, a student from another team asks them the question written on the bat. If the team can answer correctly, they keep the bat. If they don’t answer correctly, the bat goes back on the floor.

When all the bats have been fished, the team with the most wins.

3. Haunted house dictation

This is a good activity to review prepositions of place and house vocabulary. Before you start, elicit some scary things from the students, such as ghost, spider, witch, zombie. If these words are new for your students, draw a picture dictionary on the board for them to refer to in the next stage.

Next, give students an outline of a house with the rooms labeled, but without any furniture. Then dictate a sentence to the students and have them draw what you say on their individual houses. For example, ‘In the kitchen, there’s a big cupboard. In the cupboard, there’s a witch.’ Or, ‘In the living room, there’s an old sofa. A zombie is sitting on the sofa.’

You can then divide the class into pairs or small groups and have them take turns dictating sentences to each other. When they finish, they can compare their pictures and then write a short story about their haunted houses.

4. Trick-or-treat board game

Draw a 7x5 grid on card and add Start and Finish squares. Number the other squares so the students know what direction to move in. Then, on some of the squares write Trick and on some of the other squares write Treat. Finally, prepare a set of ‘trick’ and ‘treat’ cards for each group. (There are some ideas for tricks and treats below).

Before students play, teach them some phrases to use while playing the game. For example:

  • Whose turn is it?
  • It’s my turn.
  • Roll the dice.
  • Who’s winning?

Then divide the class into groups of four and give each group a board, a set of ‘trick-or-treat’ cards, a dice and a counter. Have them take turns to roll the dice and move. If they land on a Trickor Treat square, they have to take a card and do what it says. Then they put the card at the bottom of the pile.The winner is the first person to reach the Finish square.

Ideas for ‘trick’ cards

  • Go back 3 squares
  • Miss a turn
  • Go back to the start
  • Count down from 10 to 1 in English
  • Say the alphabet backwards (Z, Y, X…)
  • Laugh like a witch
  • Pretend to be a ghost

Ideas for ‘treat’ cards

  • Go forward two spaces
  • Roll again
  • Go forward five spaces
  • Choose someone to miss a turn

5. Spooky stories

Are your students bored of celebrating Halloween every year? Mix things up with stories or readers. Allowing their imagination to run wild. There are lots of you can use or get inspiration from, creating your own. If you want your pupils more involved you could also have them make or take part in your very own 'create your own adventure' spooky story.

After reading the story, have your students create comic strips of different parts of the book and display them around the classroom. If your students prefer theatrics, get them to act out or sing parts of the story.

Check out our Readers range

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    Every student and teacher knows how important revision is ahead of exams. It’s not only about how much students revise and practice – it’s also about how they do it.

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    Know what to expect

    You can download detailed 'Functions and Notions' guides for all levels. These will give you a very clear idea of the language we expect students to produce at each level. You can download the test guides for each level as well as practice tests and other important documents.

    Work on synonyms and paraphrasing

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    Create a list of errors

    We all know that learners often make the same mistakes, so a good idea is for them to create a personalized errors list.

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    Self-learner: Make sure to take note of the mistakes you make and put them into a list, taking care to avoid them in the future.

    Use a highlighter

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    Say more

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    Listen to as much as possible

    In the listening sections, learners will hear a variety of different accents from people of different ages, so it’s important to expose them/yourself to lots of different voices in preparation for the test. That might be a parent talking to a child or an elderly person in a shop, so the more experience someone has listening to different dialogues, the better. As well as the listening activities in coursebooks, encourage students to listen to podcasts or watch videos on YouTube in their free time.

    Be (in)formal

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    Keep to the word limit

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    What causes social stress?

    There may be many reasons for feeling stressed in life, but during turbulent times in society, it is often due to not feeling safe.

    Something in our environment is alerting our survival instinct. This makes our brains produce stress hormones, which get us ready to fight the threat, run from it, or freeze until it’s gone away.

    The threat might be to our physical or even social survival – and the two are linked. Things can feel even scarier when we also feel isolated from our social group, which keeps us protected from that threat.

    Human beings are social by nature. We live and work in communities, we connect through love and empathy and we protect each other. There’s truth to the saying“there’s safety in numbers”.

    But it’s not just about safety. We also define ourselves by comparing ourselves to others and working out what we are not.

    Research has found that we identify deeply with our role in society and the ‘pack’ to which we belong. This holds deep ties with our sense of safety, contentment and self-esteem. If the boundaries by which we define and position ourselves have shifted or continue to shift, we will feel unsafe, threatened and therefore stressed.

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    If we then apply this to children, the constants to whom they look for security are the adults in their life. If the adults are behaving differently, the children will feel a shift and feel unsafe and stressed too. If they don’t have their friends alongside them for social positioning, this too can lead to them feeling confused and uncertain.

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    Breath activity: Worry bubbles

    1. Sit together and invite your child to put their palms together.
    2. Invite them to take a big breath in. As they breathe in, they can draw their palms further and further apart, spreading their fingers as they imagine blowing up a big bubble between their hands.
    3. Invite them to whisper a worry into the bubble.
    4. Invite them to blow the breath out nice and slowly. As they breathe out, they can imagine blowing the bubble (and the worry) away with a big sigh.
    5. Twinkle the fingers back down to the lap, and start again, either with the same worry or a new one

    Helping them find a safety anchor inside themselves

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    Breath Activity: Counting breaths

    1. Invite your child to sit with you.
    2. Invite them to place their hands on their tummy and breathe in slowly so they push into their hands, counting slowly up to four.
    3. As they breathe out, invite them to count up to six, as they slowly empty the belly and their hands lower back down.
    4. Continue until they feel calmer. You can do this every morning or evening to help sustain balance. With younger children, they might like a teddy on their tummy to push up and down!

    These two activities can be lovely daily practices to try and provide some safety and structure to your child or students’ mental health right now. They are also enjoyable activities to try for yourself – you may like to increase the in and out count of the breath a little bit for an adult breath.