Halloween is the perfect occasion to bring energy and variety into your lessons. From costumes and sweets to scary movies and traditions, it offers plenty of engaging material to spark interest.
Here are some online Halloween-themed activities you can use in your ESL class.
😱 Halloween Lesson Plan: Why Do We Love Being Scared?
Want a full lesson? Why Do We Love Being Scared? is a ready-made lesson plan on horror films, fears and “fun fear”, with a warmer, vocabulary, a reading and discussion. Choose the A2 version or the B2 version, or browse all our lesson plans.
👻 The Spooky Sounds of Halloween Quiz
Try the Spooky Sounds Quiz. How many of these hair-raising Halloween sounds do you recognise?
Check out the Sound Quizzes page for more fun audio challenges
🎃 Halloween Picture Quiz
Test your knowledge of some crucial Halloween vocabulary with this Halloween Picture Quiz.
🦇 Halloween Question Cards
Here are some Halloween Question Cards. Some topical questions around the theme of Halloween.
💀 Halloween Hangman
This gruesome game of Halloween Hangman seems more appropriate at this time of year.
🕯️ Halloween Scatter Sheets
One student describes a word without saying it, and the others guess which word it is.
A2 Halloween Vocabulary: pumpkin, costume, trick or treat, haunted house and more.
B1 Halloween: horrifying words like cemetery, nightmare and superstitious.
☠️ Complete the Superstitions
A superstition sentence matching activity. Match the sentence halves to complete the superstitions.
🔮 Fortune Telling
Students draw mystical picture cards and tell each other’s fortunes, from past and present to future, with this fortune telling activity. For spreads, classroom ideas and useful language, see the Fortune Teller instructions and ideas.
📜 Halloween Cloze Activities
B1 Read about The History of Halloween and complete the text with words from the word bank, from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain to modern trick-or-treating.
B1 Discover Halloween Around the World, from Mexico’s Day of the Dead to China’s Hungry Ghost Festival, and learn vocabulary for customs and traditions.
B2 Explore A Night in a Haunted House, a spooky story full of atmosphere adjectives and fear idioms like scared stiff and jumped out of my skin.
🍬 Trick or Treat?
Try Trick or Treat?, a categorise activity where students decide whether things like rotten eggs, a fake spider, toffee apples and gummy worms are a trick or a treat.
😱 What Are the Scariest Things?
What Are the Scariest Things? is a ranking activity. Students put ten fears, from spiders and clowns to going to the dentist, in order from scariest to least scary, then compare with a partner.
🧛 The Best Halloween Costumes
Which costume would you wear? In The Best Halloween Costumes, students rank ten classic costumes, from witches and vampires to black cats, then explain their choices.
🕸️ A Spooky Story
B1 In A Spooky Story, students unscramble the sentences of a short haunted house story, practising the past continuous and past simple: I was reaching for my phone when a hand touched my shoulder.
🧟♂️ Classroom Halloween Activities
Check out our sister site ESLgames.com for Halloween ideas and printable activities to use in your classroom
Autumn (Fall) Activities
See the Autumn (fall) activities page for more seasonal activities.