Aiming to infuse some Halloween spirit into your lesson plans for next week? You’ve found just the place!

Halloween ranks among the most popular holidays of the year. And, it’s a great opportunity to create an engaging, out-of-the-box lesson that will capture the attention of your students.

We’ve teamed up with teachers from various subjects to present a thoughtfully curated list of eerie activities for Halloween. Explore the ideas below to discover some “spooktacular” Halloween lessons that high school students will undoubtedly love!

Read Some Frightening Fiction

What’s Halloween without a little scare? Have your students read some eerie fiction to get them in the mood for this spooky holiday. A few ideas for short stories include:

  • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
  • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
  • The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

You can have your students analyze the literary elements and themes present in these stories to enhance their reading comprehension skills. For a fun twist, you could even have the class participate in a dramatic reading of these tales. Assign different roles and encourage students to use props and sound effects to make it truly haunting.

Build an Escape Room

As autumn sets in, visiting a haunted house becomes a must-do activity for many. Imagine channeling that thrill into your classroom! You can, by putting together an educational escape room.

Numerous ready-made options exist for any subject area, offering a lot of opportunities for engaging exercises in critical thinking and collaboration. It’s exciting to see escape room tasks emerging across all subjects, encouraging more classrooms to partake in the excitement.

This particular escape game for Spanish class by Manzana para la maestra is particularly inventive. Students delve into a one-page passage about Day of the Dead and solve five accompanying puzzles.

There’s also this Legend of Sleepy Hollow escape game. In this versatile escape game, offering three different play modes, students collaborate to decipher clues and rescue Sleepy Hollow from the impending threat of the Headless Horseman! Throughout the game, they will revisit the plot, explore irony and symbolism, engage with a paired informational text, and examine figurative language.

Spooky Science

Science is about the observation of phenomena, and the developing and testing of a hypothesis to explain it. Why not try this with some spooky trappings?

For example, take this spine-tingling science STEM activity where students immerse themselves in hands-on exploration, observation, and model construction to understand phase changes and sublimation. Building bone bridges, encountering ghosts in a graveyard, or experimenting with dry ice—who wouldn’t want to be a part of that thrilling adventure?

Movie Time

Watching a movie in class? Seems a little cliche — at least, that’s what you might say at first. The trick here is the discussion that you facilitate around the movie.

You can pick from a variety of Halloween-themed (but classroom-appropriate) movies, including Coco, ParaNorman, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or the stage adaptation of Frankenstein, just to offer a couple of ideas. If you want to be more tongue-in-cheek, there’s always the ’90s kid classic Hocus Pocus, too.

All of these movies provide opportunities to explore cultural traditions, character development, and themes such as loyalty, identity, and sacrifice. Whether you’re covering the traditional role of witches and witch-hunting in early American history, or the themes of obsession and hubris present in Frankenstein, there are abundant ways for students to make connections between these movies and the texts you’ve been reading in class.