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?Ìý

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.Ìý

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.Ìý

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?’Ìý

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.Ìý

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.Ìý

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).Ìý

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 TrickÌýor Treat square, they have to take a card and do what it says. Then they put the card at the bottom of the pile.ÌýThe 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.Ìý

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.Ìý

Check out our Readers range

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  • A teacher sat with a student at his desk, the student is writing and the teacher is looking at him doing this smiling.

    7 ways to individualize your teaching

    By Andrew Walkley
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    There's no denying that tailoring your teaching to individual students is an effective strategy. However, many teachers struggle with finding the time to include teaching moments which address an individual learner's specific needs. So, what's the best way to create an individualized classroom? Andrew Walkley, co-author of Roadmap, explains the benefits of this approach and shares some techniques to ensure that every student gets the most out of your lessons.Ìý

    The best of both worlds?

    First of all, what does individualized teaching mean? It's the concept that students will learn most effectively when the activity is specific to their needs and the language they are using is appropriate for their level. This concept is sometimes seen in opposition to coursebooks and class-based learning, where students are all expected to follow the same syllabus. However, class syllabuses and coursebooks have the following benefits:

    • Providing students with common goalsÌý
    • Encouraging learners to follow an unfamiliar topic that then opens new doors of learning
    • The learning opportunities in peer-to-peer explanationÌý

    When we talk about individualized teaching in the classroom, we want to exploit the benefits of learning together while also providing opportunities for more individualized development. So, how can you, as a teacher, combine the two approaches?

    1. Involve students in choosing your route

    All classroom groups are different and made up of people from different age groups with distinct needs and interests. Roadmap can help in two ways:

    1. There is a fast and slow track. The fast track focuses on language input and speaking. The slow track has additional skills lessons at the back of the book that are thematically linked to the corresponding fast track lesson.Ìý
    2. Each lesson has a clear goal and final task. For shorter courses, get each student to choose three tasks they would definitely like to do. Based on the results, you can prioritize those lessons.

    At the start of the course, make a point of asking about students' learning priorities and then plan accordingly. Once you've completed an input and speaking lesson, you can ask the students if they want to further explore the topic through the skills lesson.

    2. Make use of tasks

    Open tasks, where students exchange their own ideas in a meaningful way, are a key part of individualized lessons. In essence, they are self-differentiating because each student will attempt to complete the task using whatever language they are able to use. In Roadmap, each of the main lessons ends with a clear task connected to a Global Scale of English (GSE) can-do statement. However, there are also lots of other speaking opportunities without a 'speaking' label (under vocabulary or reading, etc.), as well as the conversation that typically occurs in any lesson, all of which can be treated as open tasks.

    3. Give individualized feedback and then share it

    In a group setting, it's impossible to give individual feedback on every single task. However, you can give individual attention to different people throughout the lesson. Make yourself available to give students the language they need as it arises during an activity. Then, when they've completed the task, write some of these examples on the board, but leave a gap for the keywords. Elicit these keywords from other members of the class. If they can't get it, ask the student(s) you helped to explain the missing language. You might then repeat the task, but this time, pay attention to a new group.Ìý

    4. Check what vocabulary students know

    All coursebook writers and teachers make choices about what vocabulary to introduce to students. In the case of Roadmap we are guided by the GSE and teachers might like to experiment themselves using the GSE Teacher Toolkit. However, all students will have their own lexicons. You can individualize learning better by asking students to rate the words you aim to cover in a unit according to whether they know them or not. For example, 1 = it's completely new, 2 = the meaning is familiar but I don't use it, 3 = this is part of my productive vocabulary.Ìý

    5. Get students to create their own word lists and cards

    This knowledge will enable you to encourage students to focus on their individual vocabulary needs. They can reinforce learning by developing a word list or making flashcards using a web tool such as Quizlet. For new words they may have a word/collocation with an L1 translation.

    With familiar vocabulary, they could have cards with a keyword on one side and varied collocations or common examples on the other (also in English). It's worth setting aside some time in class to do this at the start of a course. If your students are engaged and motivated, it can become a regular discipline for learning new vocabulary.Ìý

    6. Ask more open questions about usage, not just meaning

    When we do vocabulary tasks from the course material in class, we can use open questions to individualize learning with the following two techniques. Firstly, as you go through the answers, rather than going in order 1 to 8, you can nominate people to give the answer that they're most unsure of and want to check. Secondly, we can ask the rest of the class open questions which focus on how words are used. For example, take these questions from different vocabulary exercises in Roadmap B1+:

    • What (other) things might you spill?
    • Why might a character in a series be killed off?
    • What (else) can you describe as reliable?
    • What can someone do to stay calm?Ìý

    You could also ask questions such as, "What's the opposite of staying calm?" or "What might you say if you spilled something?"

    When you ask these questions, you are checking meaning, but more importantly, you are also pushing students to reveal how well they know a word. Do they know the collocations of spill and reliable? Do they have the other language they might need to talk about the aspects of a TV series or help someone who is in a panic? You can then encourage students to choose how much of this potentially new language they want to add to their word lists.

    7. Provide open homework tasks and make time to share the results

    Homework is another opportunity to individualize learning. Give students a wide choice of tasks based on the material of the course or beyond, for example:

    • Choose any number of exercises they want to do from workbook materialÌý
    • Find and read one article they are interested in (in L1 or L2)
    • Write five things they want to learn how to say in English (perhaps using Google Translate)
    • Write up an interesting conversation they had in English (the conversation could be originally in L1 or L2)

    Whatever task they choose, the key is to dedicate some classroom time to discussing which homework task they did and why. Encourage them to explain their answers and what they learned through the task, and whether or not they would choose to do a similar task again.ÌýÌý

    For a more detailed introduction on how you can individualize your teaching, check out Andrew's webinar:Ìý