Celebrating the Halloween School Party

Part 2

Fun Classroom Activities without the Candy

The Halloween school party is probably the easiest holiday party to put on as far as ideas go. I'll provide a few ideas that have worked for me here, but you can find thousands of ideas on the internet. Just remember:

• Keep your school party ideas focused on learning to the greatest extent possible
• Keep them simple
• Avoid activities or food that make a mess

Go to school Halloween party ideas - Part 1

Halloween School Party Ideas:
Fun Classroom Activities

Classroom dancing: A few minutes at the beginning of the party of freeze dancing really helps set the mood. Find some fun music and then stop it every several seconds and see how long the kids can hold their poses before continuing.

"We've gotten some noise
complaints from your neighbors."

OK...I'll admit that the idea above has nothing to do with curriculum! But it does get your whole classroom community to stop focusing on "how cool is my costume" and start focusing on having fun together. Here are some curriculum-based ideas:

Finalize your study of bats, which I mentioned on the school party ideas page. Creating bat hats is a fun way to do this.

Pumpkin estimating I. You can bring in a pumpkin and each student can try their hand at estimating its weight, diameter and circumference (if these skills are appropriate for your grade level) before measuring these factors to see how close they came. (No, no one "wins" the pumpkin!)

Pumpkin estimating II. Another math activity that requires a little work at home from you is to remove the seeds from a small pumpkin and a large one and count them. Put the seeds from the small one in a bag and let the kids know how many there are. They have to extrapolate to the large pumpkin and estimate how many seeds it contained.

Halloween School Party Ideas: Food

Keeping with my healthy-food theme, here are some snack ideas for your parent volunteers to bring:

No

• Vegetables and dip
• Fruit and dip
• "Ants on a log" (peanut-butter-filled celery with raisins)
• Cherry tomatoes (= eyeballs)
• Sugar-free Jello (make it black!)
• Cracker spiders (two crackers with pretzel-stick legs held in between with peanut butter

If you don't have parent volunteers and still want to provide a snack, choose the easiest single thing from the list above and call it good.

If you think other classrooms will go along, you could enlist your fitness teacher (the supposed biggest promoter of health in your building) to judge each classroom party for the healthiest snacks.

If bags of candy show up, in spite of what you have told parents, each student gets one piece that they place in a treat bag to take home and the rest goes home with the kid who brought it.

The final word

Does it all sound exhausting? It is! Classroom behavior management is always more difficult when a routine has been upset...and a Halloween school party defines "upset routine." As I've mentioned several times, keep it simple. Fun classroom activities don't have to be elaborate to be engaging for students.

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