3 Easy to Implement Halloween Writing Activities for Upper Elementary

There is nothing more motivating to upper elementary students than the holidays! I love to use special days throughout the year to engage students across content areas. We read holiday and seasonal picture books, practice close reading strategies with nonfiction holiday passages, play holiday games during math, and of course, you can find holiday writing activities adorning the walls

There is no holiday or season more exciting to students than Halloween! Here are my favorite writing activities to do with students to harness all of their Halloween excitement into focused learning opportunities.

Haunted Haiku Writing
Fall themed alternative: Harvest Haiku

Haiku poems are focused on one narrow topic and written with exactly 17 syllables. Since haiku poetry follows a strict pattern, all students, including struggling writers, see this form of poetry as an attainable task that they will finish successfully. Have students write a Halloween haiku about any Halloween topic they like, or create a brainstormed list of topics together as a class such as: candy corn, bats, spiders, costumes, and ghosts. Teacher tip: Write each topic from your brainstormed list on small pieces of paper and place them into a basket. Next,  have students select a topic from the basket. This will not only ensure a variety of topics will be written about, but also helps students to get to work writing their haiku immediately! (Grab a free Halloween haiku template to use with your students at the bottom of this post.)

How to Carve a Pumpkin Writing
Fall themed alternative: How to Enjoy Fall

"How-To" writing is the most engaging of the writing genres, yet it is also the most forgotten! Students love to be the expert and write "how-to" pieces! If you want to write Halloween how-to's students can write the steps of carving a pumpkin. If you want to write seasonal how-to's, students can write the steps of any fall activity, like leaf pile jumping or making candied apples.  Keep this project simple by using lined paper and plain white paper. Have students fold the plain white paper into eighths and label each box 1-8. Next, have students illustrate each step to carving a pumpkin in the boxes to illustrate their written piece. What I love about procedural writing is that it provides students with the opportunity to not only write about how to do something, but illustrate how to do it, too. This makes an adorable and informative bulletin board for fall!

Persuasive Writing Teacher Halloween Costume
Fall themed alternative: Book Character Day

This is my favorite Halloween writing project and is perfect to complete with students as early as the first week of October. The concept is simple: students must pick a costume for you to wear on Halloween and write a persuasive writing essay to convince you to pick their costume idea. What I love about this persuasive writing prompt is that you can turn this into as big or as small of a project as you want. I have used this prompt as a simple morning journal entry and I have also done an elaborate writing project complete with bulletin board display of student's writing and illustrations of me in their costume (which are priceless). This is a highly motivating project for all students and makes a great introduction to persuasive writing, as well as adorable bulletin board display.
Teacher tip: Read aloud students' writing pieces anonymously and allow students to vote on what costume they want you to wear!

Whether you want to welcome Halloween or fall into your classroom, engage your students with high interest and holiday and seasonally themed writing activities. Not only will your students love it and be highly engaged, but you will love the writing that they produce!

In need of DIGITAL Halloween activities this year? Start with this!

Looking for more Halloween activities to engage your upper elementary students? Check out the activities below:

• Ghostly STEM Fun! // Tried & True Teaching Tools
• Incorporating Halloween and CER into the Science Classroom // Samson’s Shoppe
• Halloween Activities for Any Content Area // The Owl Teacher
• Speak, Listen, Draw Halloween Communication Activity // Feel-Good Teaching

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