Halloween Learning Blend

Holidays are a great time to blend learning with fun. Merge tradition with new experiences. Halloween, in particular, is ALL about creativity and exploration. Do you have your costume picked out yet? Everyone loves a good theme and Halloween always delivers. Let’s experience spooky season and engage in brain building activities with this Halloween learning blend.

Halloween is my favorite holiday, hands down. I love the season, the colors and the opportunity to explore my creative side. I start planning out our family costumes ahead of time and decorating begins promptly on October 1. My son is 6 and can’t really read a calendar, but he definitely knows when spooky season is nearly upon us. He loves getting out our collection of spooky bones and giant spiders. We have tons of Halloween books and family activities that have become seasonal traditions. As a parent and a teacher, I love a chance to mesh learning with fun, especially with a Halloween theme! Let’s check out the following Halloween learning blend activities you and your family can do together.

Spooky Silly Sentences

If you haven’t heard “Spooky Scary Skeletons” yet, I am here to make the necessary introductions. Don’t hate me. My son absolutely loves this song and he does a great bones dance along with it. Have a silly dance party and sing along! Then, transition into a language arts activity and have some fun with Spooky Silly Sentences!

We created a free printable resource for you to blend writing, reading and all things Halloween for a spooktacular family activity. You’ll need scissors, glue and a spooky sense of humor to work on this activity. My son and I did this together yesterday and he loved putting together silly spooky sentences like, “A spooky zombie cackles around the graveyard!” You’ll definitely be cackling yourself silly as you put together spooky sentences with this Halloween learning blend activity.

Scrambled Halloween words? Yes, please!

If your kids are like mine, they’ll roar with laughter when you suggest things like “scrambled brains” and “zombie chains”. Many children don’t like writing simply because they don’t feel confident about it. Writing is a skill that improves with practice. One way to make writing fun is to literally mix things up. Start with a handful of words, and to go with our theme, we’ll use some Halloween words! Check out our Halloween scrambled word activity.

Unscrambling words activates so much of our creativity. Focusing on specific words helps support a growing vocabulary, building grammar skills and sparks creativity for writing. As a bonus activity, have your children put the unscrambled words into sentences and then build upon your sentences to craft a short story for a true Halloween learning blend experience! What will you write about? A haunted house? Maybe a giant pumpkin who talks?

The possibilities are endless. We have provided a list of 15 words, but what can you and your little pumpkin come up with together? Add to the list. The more you brainstorm, the more you’ll have to expand on in your story. Over a weekend, work on writing a handful of spooky stories together and make a collection of Halloween tales. You can add drawings or collages to make a family anthology of Halloween stories to share each year. Additionally, your family can turn your stories into a play for puppets of act it out live for a Friday night family party. Keep it going in the comments and tell us how you can incorporate these activities into even more!

Halloween learning blend word search time!

We’re going to send you on a Halloween hunt! A word search hunt, that is! Can you find everything, all 15 words, in this Halloween word search? Uncover your spooky side by circling your favorite Halloween words like “skeleton”, “candy”, and “goblin”! Word searches can be calming and encourage focus. Make it a fun game and up the stakes by creating a word search challenge. Who can find the most words in 5 minutes? Or, who can find “vampire” first? As a further creative experience, turn the words found into a short story or a comic strip. For this activity, you might want to get more supplies out such as colored pencils, scissors, glue and good paper.

You can use some of the Halloween words you brainstormed above and create your own word searches. There are word search generators available for free online that you and your family can access to make another word search using ALL the Halloween words. How many Halloween words can your family come up with? What did we leave out? Leave us a note in the comments with suggestions for your favorite Halloween words and activities.

Get spooky together!

Halloween is a great time to feed our brains and our bellies (with candy). Use our resources as a jumping off point for your own creative and engaging activities that your family can do together. We never grow tired of hearing what your families are up to and the brilliant ideas you have. This Halloween, we hope that you have a super spooky, super silly time and stay safe.