Get ready to cast a spell of excitement and creativity in your preschool classroom this October! With the crisp autumn air and the anticipation of spooky fun, it’s the perfect time to engage your little learners in a world of Halloween fun.
From Halloween circle time to counting with pumpkins and a spooky read aloud, we have a cauldron full of ideas to make this Halloween season a magical and educational experience for your preschoolers. So, grab your broomstick and join us as we dive into a bundle of Halloween preschool activities that are sure to leave your kids enchanted and eager to learn.
Halloween Preschool Lesson Plans
When it comes to teaching preschoolers there is one thing we absolutely love as educators – the opportunity to create holiday lessons! That, and the excitement young children have to explore every month with the excitement we wish all students had.
While every season has fun themes and holidays to explore throughout the school year, we have to admit that fall is a favorite. From Halloween to Thanksgiving there are so many ways to engage preschoolers through these ideas. Whether it be learning about pumpkins, turkeys, or everything in between, students seem to love this time of year as much as the teachers.
Today, we are going to explore several ways to incorporate Halloween into your preschool lesson plans. Starting with Halloween Exploration stations all the way to a perfect prek Halloween read aloud we have lesson plans to cover every subject area.
Here are the 5 Halloween Preschool Lesson Plans we are going to explore:
- Halloween Exploration Stations
- Halloween Circle Time Activities
- Halloween Math & Literacy Centers
- Halloween PreK STEM activity
- PreK Halloween Read Aloud
Even though we have introduced each of these as a lesson plan you will find that each of these areas of learning actually includes SEVERAL lesson plans! For example, our PreK Halloween Read Aloud comes complete with lesson plans to cover 3 to 5 days of learning!
If you are ready to see ALL of the lesson plans we have created for you (that will cover the entire month of October) keep reading!
Halloween Exploration Stations for PreK
As a preschool teacher, you know that exploration stations are key to your students’ learning. Therefore, it is important to continue to include this type of learning even when you want to explore a theme – like Halloween.
Luckily, because exploration stations can include a variety of activities it is easy to adapt them each month to match the theme you want to explore. Below you will see how we created exploration stations around Halloween ideas.
Halloween Exploration Station Ideas
- Explore: read informational sheets on Halloween
- Build: use the cards to build Halloween items with pom poms
- Color: follow the steps to draw and color a Halloween picture
- Make: look at the cards to make witches brew
- Solve: place the how to carve a pumpkin puzzle in the correct order
- Sort: place the Halloween items on the correct mat
- Create: follow the directions to make a Frankenstein craft
- Match: cut and paste to match costumes to characters
- Write/Draw: write or draw about your costume
As you can see, these nine stations allow preschoolers to explore several different skills while still exploring Halloween. Therefore, providing your students with several opportunities to continue to learn while engaging with a fun topic.
In addition to the ideas for these stations, we have provided everything you need to implement them. Here is what you will get with this resource:
- 9 printable exploration stations, text to read aloud to students
- Tent signs for each station
- Editable work-boards
- Editable checklists for students
- Labels
- Letter banner template
With a few print jobs and a bit of organization, you can have these stations ready to use as soon as tomorrow!
Halloween Circle Time Activities
Preschool wouldn’t be preschool without circle time. Circle time is the crux of the preschool day – allowing the students to review important day-to-day skills (like how to read a calendar) to reviewing key learning principles (like the alphabet).
Just like with exploration stations, circle time can easily be aligned with a fun and engaging theme – like Halloween! To help you kick off the month of October with a Halloween themed circle time we put together everything you need to get started.
- teacher overview
- detailed circle time lesson plans
- print or projectable text
- 2 reread/review the text activities
- 3 responding to text activities (interactive writing, vocabulary, my connections)
- song lyrics with a familiar tune + 2 corresponding activities
- pocket chart poem + 2 corresponding activities
- 3 game-style whole class activities
- 6 corresponding independent worksheets
Each of the activities above has been carefully planned to support student learning while engaging them in the spirit of the season.
Halloween Literacy Activities for Preschool
Preschool is the first place that students begin to develop literacy skills. Therefore, it is essential that literacy is at the center of every unit.
While reading as a whole class and exploring a text together is one element of literacy, read alouds are not the early literacy practice preschoolers need. They also need focused lessons on sounds, letters, and writing.
To help you incorporate literacy throughout the month of October we created 9 Halloween themed literacy stations for you to use in your classroom.
- Rhyming Puzzles: Halloween Match
- Build It: Play-dough Fine Motor
- Syllable Smash: Halloween Word Syllables
- Spot and Dot: Finding Letters and Saying Sounds
- Look and Write: Halloween Words
- ABC puzzles: Upper and Lowercase Letters
- Puffy Ghost: On my Own Craft
- Candy Corn Match: Identifying Beginning Sounds
- Free Write: Halloween Writing Center
- Witches Brew: Name Craft
PreK Halloween Math
Just like literacy, math skills are an important part of any preschool curriculum. Therefore, we created eight additional Halloween activities that are designed to develop math skills.
- Flip and Count: 1:1 correspondence
- Clip It: Counting Objects to 10
- Order by Size: Small and Big
- Roll and Count: Counting to 10
- Color by Numbers: Colors
- Halloween Puzzles: Patterns
- Sorting: Halloween Colors
- Shape Match: 2D Spider Shapes
The best part? These PreK math stations are included with the literacy stations! That means you only need one resource to cover all of your math and literacy practice for the month.
Halloween STEM Projects for Kids
STEM is no longer considered something only taught at the college level or in high schools. Over the years it has become a significant part of all school curriculums. Yup, that includes preschool!
Therefore, we have spent time creating STEM activities that are engaging and appropriate for young children. Through our STEM projects for kids, students explore how to solve real world problems by engaging in the inquiry process.
For October, we created a STEM project that asks preschoolers to help Ghostie return to his haunted house before midnight. While this may not be what we as adults consider a real world problem, it is a fun and engaging problem that activates the students’ imagination and inquiry skills. Therefore, helping them access the skills needed to solve a problem just as you would in a more serious real world situation.
If you have never taught STEM before, don’t worry. Just like with all of our resources, we have provided you with detailed lesson plans and everything you need to guide your students through the learning process.
PreK Halloween Read Aloud
You didn’t think we would leave you without a fun Halloween read aloud, did you? Of course not! Read alouds are one of our favorite learning activities and another one that is a key part of the PreK classroom.
For the month of October, we selected the hilarious children’s book Trick or Treat Crankenstein by Samantha Berger. This is part of the wonderful Crankenstein series that follows the main character, Crankenstein, who starts his days cranky but learns that while it is okay to have these emotions they are only temporary. It is a truly wonderful book series that is quite relatable for students.
Whether you have used this book in your classroom before or it’s your first time, these ready to teach lesson plans will help you easily explore this book with your students. Furthermore, these Trick or Treat Crankenstein lesson plans will cover 3-5 days of learning. Therefore, providing you with several days of ready to teach reading lessons – which gives you more time to enjoy teaching (or maybe, even trick or treating!).
This read aloud is a great addition to the literacy centers we shared above or it can be taught on its own. This goes for all of the preK Halloween theme lesson plans shared in this post. Each of them can easily be taught on their own or bundled together for a full month’s worth of Halloween lesson plans for your prek classroom.
