How will you be celebrating with your students this year? In my experience, students are usually twitching with excitement for Halloween festivities and it’s hard to reign them in or get them to focus on learning. Each year, I try to come up with literacy activities that are fun, effective, and don’t feel like “work;” however, often that means getting creative… and maybe even a little bit silly!
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Your students will love filling in the blanks with the words from their word lists to create silly or spooky stories. For parts of speech practice and to make the story more of a surprise, have the students fill in the word lists BEFORE even previewing the story! If you want to make this activity more of a cloze activity, skip over the word list page and have them write directly on the story page.
If you want the students’ stories to be more Halloween-focused, consider brainstorming Halloween words ahead of time in their writing notebooks or on chart paper. If your students are unfamiliar with these kinds of stories, you may need to model the whole fill-in-the-blank story process… especially for younger students! Teach them by creating one story together before letting them work in partners or work independently.
If you have time for students to share their stories, with the whole class or in partner pairs, use this activity as a chance for students to practice oral reading fluency. Spooky stories are perfect texts to practice adding extra expression to our voices!
Beware… the stories could be very silly and the students may not be able to read them because they are giggling too much (not that I would know from experience!).
Looking for more Halloween resources to try out this year, check out my Halloween Word Work + Literacy Activity resource that comes in both a print and digital version!
