9 Fun & Creative Halloween Activities for English Language Arts (Espresso Shot)

October is in full swing and we are sharing our favorite October/Halloween resources. It's hard to keep your students engaged, so here are a few ideas to keep the attention of your English Language Arts classes before all that sugar kicks in from the candy they will receive on October 31st!

If you know me, you know that I LOVE to incorporate the holidays into my teaching. I do my best to create practical resources for my students; if they happen to fall around a particular holiday, then I usually find a way to sneak in some elements of that particular season. I created this Halloween Career Project as a fun way for students to learn basic skills and requirements for a job or career. This is also a great way to bring the Halloween spirit into a class while completing the course requirements in a creative way. Students will randomly select a Halloween-related career, then complete a variety of tasks highlighting skills for that particular job. - The Classroom Sparrow

In today's stressful world, offering a calming activity like coloring can be very effective in class--especially for teenagers. Studies have shown that students who are given the opportunity to color and doodle during a lecture or while listening to audiobooks are more academically motivated. I love having holiday-themed coloring pages readily available for students for those moments in class when they need a stress reliever or brain break. Click HERE to check out my Halloween Coloring Pages. - Tracee Orman

Students are pretty excited on Halloween, and one way to reign them in is to focus on content. These Halloween Grammar Worksheets work great as a Halloween station activity. Or, if needed, they also work great as an emergency sub plan. - The Daring English Teacher

The one autumn activity that I look forward to EVERY year is the scary story my students write using these Spooky Story Learning Stations. Not only are these stations highly engaging, but they help the kids learn about literacy elements AND the importance of the revision process. The students love the activities, the end results are always spooktacular! - Room 213

My students love all things spooky and scary, so it is easy to motivate them to write these spooky Halloween mystery stories! Using a unique "Dial-A-Mystery" technique to generate ideas, all students should have something to write about and be creatively inspired. Click HERE to check out my Halloween Writing Activity. - Addie Williams

 It is always fun and engaging when we tie in seasonal holidays with meaningful learning opportunities. That's why I created these Halloween-themed figurative language activities. From writing horror movie tag lines, to analyzing figurative language in frightening fiction, students will have fun, while also deepening their knowledge of key figurative language techniques; think metaphors, similes, hyperbole, personification and more! - Stacey Lloyd

 I absolutely adore teaching spooky, creepy and scary short stories. The suspense, the twists and turns in the plot lines, and the sinister characters always seem to draw students in. This is why I use Halloween as an excuse to spend Octobers studying my favorite eerie and freaky short stories. Whether you are inside the mind of a demented protagonist in the Tell-Tal Heart, avoiding a dinosaur attack in A Sound of Thunder, or suffering the consequences of wishes gone wrong in The Monkey's Paw, these plot lines and characters are sure to hold your students' attention. I've bundled all of my favorites together which you can find in my Spooky Short Story Unit. - Presto Plans

In this Pre-Reading Inferences Challenge, students play a young detective investigating the mystery of the black cat. The events follow Poe's classic story, but without the first-person narrator, it becomes a mystery that students solve using clues and evidence that they find along the way. At each step, students share their inferences with me (The Police Chief) and I make sure they're on track before they proceed. Afterwards, we read the story and they confirm whether they were correct. This is a fun collaborative activity to practice inferencing! - Nouvelle ELA

I love "The Raven", but since it's such a complex poem, my students need help understanding its intricacies. We break it down with this stations activity so that students can rotate and annotate for one element at a time: symbolism, allusion and so on. It's been a hit in my classroom! - Secondary Sara

We hope you enjoyed reading about some of our BEST Halloween lessons to use this October! Happy Halloween from all of us at The Secondary English Coffee Shop!