There’s no better way to celebrate the tricks and treats of All Hallows Eve in school than having your students practice key ELA and math skills with printable Halloween classroom activities! From spooky writing prompts to a coordinate plane full of creepy creatures, look no further for effective and easy-to-use practice for students.
Each of the activities listed below is a fun and easy printable that can seamlessly be incorporated into your daily classroom activities, giving your middle and high school students chances to work on English, reading, and math skills in a fun and engaging way. Our Piqosity team has also developed original, spooktacular math problems and reading comprehension questions exclusively for this article that are sure to challenge and delight!
Halloween Math Activities
One of the only things scarier than ghosts and ghouls is a student without a strong math foundation! To avoid a frightening outcome, consider implementing one of the following (completely free!) printable Math Halloween classroom activities as a classroom activity or homework assignment.
1. Halloween Math Mystery Picture
Teachers are raving about this fun Halloween classroom activity! Perfect for upper elementary students, this resource tasks students with completing several addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems. The answers students get from those problems will direct them in coloring a mystery Halloween-themed picture!
This activity is great as an assignment for early finishers or to provide to a substitute. Its range of operations allow for students of different levels to be able to have fun and practice key skills.
Created and made available for free download by Mr. Peterson.
2. Frightening Rounding Numbers
Learning how to round different types of numbers quickly and correctly is a key skill students must learn early on in their math education. Give your 3rd-5th grade students the opportunity to practice rounding numbers to the nearest ten, hundred, thousand, and tenth—while enjoying some festive Halloween fun—with this PDF worksheet packet!
Included in this free resource are four printable worksheets that cover different types of rounding, each with a different spooky theme. For example, the “Pumpkin Patch” worksheet tasks students to round numbers to the nearest hundred by picking the right pumpkin!
Created and made available for free download by Teaching Buddy Loves Math.
3. Creepy Coordinate Grid Activity
It’s essential for students to be comfortable working with coordinate planes and grids, as they are integral parts of all upper-level math curricula. That’s why this next resource is a great tool for middle grade students to practice graphing while having fun!
This printable group activity provides a creepy coordinate plane with spooky creatures and Halloween objects spread throughout. Students will explore this coordinate plane, with tasks such as finding the ordered pairs of the Halloween icons and understanding the mirrored nature of the x- and y-axes.
Created and made available for free download by Mixing it up in the Middle.
4. Witches’ Brew Halloween Fractions Activity
Though this activity will task your students with working with a recipe, don’t assign it before lunch—they might all lose their appetites!
This final Halloween math activity on our list is here to strengthen your students’ grasp on fractions. Provided is a recipe for Witches’ Brew—a dreadful dish made with ⅓ cup of eyeballs, 26 crickets, and more nauseating ingredients—and students are tasked to list the ingredient quantities for different serving sizes. Multiplying and dividing fractions is the key concept here, and students will even have the chance to make their own spooky recipe with fractions to operate with.
Created and made available for free download by Rachel Lynette.
Halloween Math Questions by Piqosity
Piqosity devised the following spooky problems in order to test your students’ math knowledge and prepare you for a bountiful Halloween! Another Halloween classroom activity, solve these tricks to prepare for your treats!
Original Piqosity Halloween Math Quiz
1. During Halloween night, one vampire comes out to play. For each vampire, 2 werewolves accompany them. For each werewolf, 5 ghouls come out looking for a snack. For each ghoul, 7 ghosts come into town.
How many monsters are out stalking the night?
A. 14
B. 35
C. 68
D. 83
2. A group of 3 friends are trick or treating on Halloween. Let’s say that the trio only visits 8 houses, and they take 1 piece of candy from the first house. Each time they visit another house, they become more greedy and each take double the amount of candy that they took from the previous house. How much candy will the trio collect by the time they visit all 8 houses?
A. 275
B. 945
C. 765
D. 637
3. At the Spooktacular Carnival, they were giving out a cylindrical jar of candy corn to anyone who can guess the correct number of candy in the jar. You, being a clever little fellow, knew that you could find the number of candy corns by simply counting the candy corn along the width and height of the jar.
If there were 146 candy corns along the width of the jar and 282 along the height, how many candy corns were there in total? Round your answer to the nearest whole number.
A. 18,884,465
B. 4,721,116
C. 9,118,869
D. 36,475,474
Math Answer Key and Explanations
1. D
Let’s keep a running tally of the monsters that are out and about.
First, we have 1 vampire.
Next, we know that we have 2 werewolves for every vampire. Since we have 1 vampire, we have 2 werewolves.
We also know that there are 5 ghouls for each werewolf. Since there are 2 werewolves, there are 10 ghouls.
For each ghoul , there are 7 ghosts. Since there are 10 ghouls, there are 70 ghosts.
If we add up all of our monsters (1 + 2 + 10 + 70), we get a total of 83 monsters! D is correct.
Halloween is full of unseen dangers, so always remember to be careful while out trick or treating.
2. C
When the trio visit the first house they only obtain 1 piece of candy and each time they double the amount they took before.
The amount of candy each of the three received at the first house is equal to: 20 = 1.
The amount of candy each of the three received at the first house is equal to: 21 = 2.
The total amount of candy each person will receive from the 8 houses can be modeled with the following equation:
20 + 21 + 22 + 23 + 24 + 25+ 26 + 27
Multiply this value by 3 to calculate the total amount of candy the three will receive all together.
3(20 + 21 + 22 + 23 + 24 + 25+ 26 + 27) = 3(255) = 765
The trio will have 765 pieces of candy if they visit 8 houses. C is correct.
3. B
Since we know that the jar of candy corn is a cylinder, if we assume that each candy corn is a unit, we can approximate the total number of candy corns in the jar by finding the volume of the jar!
The formula to find the volume of a cylinder is the following: V = pi x r^2 x h
We know that the height of the jar in candy corn is 282, but we don’t know what the radius is. This is because 146 candy corns along the width actually tells us the diameter. However, we can find the radius from the diameter by dividing the diameter by 2! Doing so will give us a radius of 73.
Now we can plug in all of our variables into the equation:
V = pi x r^2 x h
V = pi x 73^2 x 282
V = pi x 5329 x 282
V = pi x 1,502,778
V = 4,721,116
Therefore, the correct answer is 4,721,116, which is B.
If you got the correct answer, congratulations! You just won approximately 4,721,116 pieces of candy corn! Don’t eat it all in one sitting ;)
Halloween ELA Activities
Students need every chance they can to practice their reading and writing skills, and this spooky holiday provides the perfect opportunity to engage them with creative and fun themed assignments!
From printable reading comprehension worksheets to spooky writing prompts, the following free English Halloween classroom activities are sure to impress and captivate even the most reluctant ELA learners.
1. Candy Corn Halloween Reading Passage & Questions
This first ELA printable Halloween activity is all treats, no tricks! Provided is an informational passage about the history and manufacturing process of candy corn. Students will appreciate learning about this famous (and somewhat mysterious) treat!
Following the passage is a worksheet of reading comprehension questions that quiz students on details from the passage, to find word meaning in context, and to write a paragraph concerning the main idea. This activity will help students flex their ELA muscles holistically and develop a better understanding of how candy is made today.
Created and made available for free download by Shelly Rees.
2. Petrifying Parts of Speech PDF
Offered in both B&W and color versions, this Halloween Grammar packet will help elementary and early middle schoolers learn facts about Halloween while testing their ELA knowledge.
The assignment’s task is simple: identify the part of speech for the bolded word for each of the 20 sentences. Still, students that need a bit more practice with pronouns or conjunctions will benefit from the challenge! Assign it as some light homework, distribute it as an early finisher after a class test, or save it ’till Halloween as a way to get some more learning in before your classroom’s celebration.
Created and made available for free download by Teaching to the Middle.
3. Spooky Story Writing Activity
This next resource of these ELA Halloween classroom activities is great for upper-elementary and lower-middle students, even if you have minimal prep time. An interactive way for students to understand the elements of a story and practice creative writing, it’s equipped with lesson plans and printable activity tools to get your class in the Halloween mood ASAP!
The resource first has your students roll four dice to determine four different elements of their story—the setting, a character, an obstacle (or, the conflict), and the sentence they’ll start with. These random choices will prevent indecisiveness and inspire them in filling out their prewriting worksheets before getting started on their original stories. You’ll love reading the terrifying tales your scholars come up with!
Created and made available for free download by Brain Waves Instruction.
4. Picture Prompts Halloween Classroom Activities Packet
Another creative writing activity, the last of our featured Halloween classroom activities is perfect for any middle-grade classroom!
The resource comes with four Halloween themed pictures which students will be tasked with writing about. The printable worksheets ask students to pick one of the scary photos and describe different aspects of it, all in preparation for them to create a narrative about the image. While the Spooky Story activity focuses on story elements, this activity will have them dive deeper into the writing process.
Created and made available for free download by A Pair of Pears.
Halloween Reading Comprehension Questions by Piqosity
A staple of American horror and mystery fiction is Edgar Allen Poe’s repertoire of spooky stories, so reading his work is a perfect way to celebrate Halloween! The passage below is an excerpt from one of his most succinct short stories, a frightening tale about a painting.
Piqosity has provided this passage and our original questions for free, directly from our newly ELA courses! To pair with one of the many ELA Halloween classroom activities above, this quiz will put your students’ ELA skills to the test while enhancing their Halloween-y mood.
Halloween Reading Passage: Excerpt From The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe
Reading Comprehension Questions
1. Why does the painter’s wife despise his art?
A. She believes his paintings are grotesque and displeasing.
B. She views art as her rival for her husband’s attention.
C. She resents his art because she wishes she could paint as well as he can.
D. She thinks art is useless and unprofitable.
2. In line 67, the word “pallid” most nearly means
A. puny.
B. proud.
C. poor.
D. pale.
3. This passage contains all of the following rhetorical devices EXCEPT
A. anaphora.
B. assonance.
C. parallelism.
D. alliteration.
Passage Answer Key and Explanations
1. B
Lines 29-30 describe the wife as, “hating only the Art which was her rival.” Lines 25-26 characterizes the artist and his Art as, “He…having already a bride in his Art.” Therefore, “she views art as her rival for her husband’s attention.”
2. D
The correct answer is “pale.” The sentence is describing the artist’s horror at what he has created and how he has grown pallid. “Puny”, “proud”, and “poor” do not describe how someone might change as they are frightened. A terrified person is often described as growing “pale.”
3. A
The correct answer is “anaphora.” “Pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud..” (lines 67-68) is an example of assonance. “From hour to hour” and “from day to day” (lines 39-40) is an example of parallelism. “Mighty marvel” (line 51) is an example of alliteration. There is no example of “anaphora”, the repetition of words at the beginning of a clause or sentence, in the passage.
Find More ELA and Math Resources at Piqosity!
We hope you didn’t find these Halloween classroom activities too frightful. After all, ELA and math skills are the most integral academic skills to have! If you enjoyed these Halloween printables and resources, be sure to look out for our free Diwali and Thanksgiving activities collections coming up. You can find more (non-Halloween-themed) ELA and math lessons with questions of similar difficulty levels, as well as the remaining excerpts of Poe’s “The Black Cat”, in our full-length courses!
We offer full-length, online ELA and Math courses for grades 5-11 as well as full ISEE, ACT, and SAT test prep courses, each of which includes 10 practice exams, dozens of concept lessons, personalized practice software, and more.
The best part? You can try out all of Piqosity’s features with our free community account. When you’re ready to upgrade, Piqosity’s year-long accounts start at only $89. Plus, get a 10% off coupon just by signing up for our mailing list!
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