Halloween Activities, props and games.

It is indeed one of my favorite times of the year. I must admit, teaching Halloween related activities, game sand words this week in Kindergarten was amazing. The kids loved it, and yet, somehow I feel I enjoyed it more than them! This week I dressed as a witch (or wizard), spider and for the Halloween day finally, a full pirate. I ensured my sword was inflatable as I knew that the kids would a) want to play with it and b) would hit each other with it. So yea….

Halloween is something that while not widely celebrated in Asia, is generally always taught as a module for ESL (English as a second language) in schools and kindergartens. This is because a) its super cool and fun, and b) its an exposure to western culture and traditions.

Of course the vocabulary are all super interesting to these kids as well. They all love pretending to be a ghost, monster, vampire, bat and countless other related characters. That is always a good start to the lessons. But adding in props and games has made it such a fantastic week.

Firstly, the masks… Always the masks and headbands. The kids just love them. Ill typically make new headbands each week for various vocabulary as they just cant get enough of them. This time it was super handy to be able to roll play songs and vocabulary. Even easy songs like “knock knock, trick or treat” by SuperSimpleSongs – Whilst we have no tv/video in the classroom, we certainly have a speaker and know the vocabulary. So having the Halloween character crowns on the kids enabled us to sing along and roll play the entire song. They also love just running around the classroom attempting to scare each other.

I also added a few other props to my morning lessons. Such as cutting out the vocabulary words (ghost, monster etc) and gluing them to lolly sticks. I will admit that the lolly stick character cutting was a bit tedious. So I would only recommend this if you are commited. But everything else was easy. I used them in a little puppet show and play. Boy oh boy did these kids learn the vocabulary well this week.

One of their vocabulary words was ‘haunted house’ so of course I had to make one. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was. I just made two A4 pieces of paper. Printed a haunted house on the first one, and ghosts/monsters/vampires etc on the second. Then simply cut ‘windows’ in the haunted house to correspond to the paper behind it before gluing them together. So the kids could open a ‘window’ and see what is hiding behind. It was so successful and engaging that I actually might design a few more later for other activities that aren’t Halloween related.

As for crafts, we made:
a skeleton out of straws/cotton buds/lolly sticks and various other things.
Different masks out of felt.
Pumpkin candy jars made out of felt.
The haunted house mentioned above – we made one together
A large vampire painted onto carboard.

We also decorated a lot of props from various items we had on hand. For instance; Made capes out of paper to turn bowling pins in vampires, cut out small felt bats to stick to various things, turned safety cones into ‘witches hats’, covered lolly pops in white craft paper to make little ghosts (boy they loved these), and lastly, twisted pipe-cleaners around lollypop sticks to make spiders (spider legs). All of which were a huge hit with the students. With a little imagination, there are so many things that can be achieved.

All of the craft templates, masks and headbands are available for free download here:

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See you soon,

Shannon