Celebrating holidays is a great way to pass the time and make life more interesting. So this year, just go for even more interesting than usual. Why not? Homeschooling means you have the freedom to center your lessons around whatever you want to do! Here is a list of some of our favorite homeschool Halloween lessons of all time!

If you are using our Wonderful World curriculum you already have a whole list of lessons to use this month on monsters, bats, and spiders! But for the rest of you, here are 14 more Halloween ideas!  (If you are wondering, you can also start Wonderful World at any time, no need to start from the beginning if you want to try it out!)

Things to do with your kids for Halloween this year:

1. Build a pumpkin launching device.

And hurtle pumpkins as far as you can. (Try not to actually harm anyone). Trebuchets, cannons, and catapults are all wonderful lessons in physics.

2. Dress up every day from now until Halloween.

Costumes every day.  Who is going to stop you?

3. Read Halloween and spooky books together.

If you don’t know where to start, check out the resource page for Wonderful World. There’s a whole list of great picture books about bats, pumpkins, spiders, and more.

4. Hide the candy.

Decorate tiny oranges with sharpies to have jack-o-lantern faces and hide those, small pumpkins or some kind of candy! Kids just like finding things. This game works on logic and reasoning and being observant, so it is also good for them!

5. Decorate EVERYTHING!

Put tiny tombstones in your potted plants. String paper bats all over your house. Carve a baker’s dozen jack-o-lanterns for the yard.   All of this counts as art! Exploring making many kinds of art is something our public schools often struggle to afford, but you can do what you want.

6. Enjoy the night!

Pull out the telescope you keep forgetting to use and let the kids scan the moon for aliens on Halloween night. Use the NASA moon viewing guide to get more out of your experience.

7. Learn a bunch of weird Halloween songs to sing.

You can sing songs and call it music lessons or try dancing Halloween themed songs for P.E. The Monster Mash and Jack-o-lantern are two of my favorite Halloween songs.

8. Try Making Homemade Treats!

Make candy apples or cookies that look like monsters! Your child can get excited about cooking up creepy treats.  Make jello in a brain-shaped mold or cake shaped like a pumpkin. Cooking is a great way to work in some math skills and decorating counts as art! It is also a great way to make sure you know what your child is eating and take away the sting of food allergies that make trick or treating lesson fun.

9. Find some good Halloween movies to watch together as a family.

I’m not too big on scary movies, but who doesn’t love Hocus Pocus or The Addams Family? You can go for learning more about Hispanic culture and the Day of the Dead by watching movies like Coco or The Book of Life.

10. Create candy based scavenger hunts.

My kids always like ones that involve reading clues that led to more clues until they find the candy. This means that the reluctant reader is carefully reading the instructions to “Look where we keep the frozen peas” and “Your next clue is wondering why it is so dark in here and smells like pumpkin ” That last one would be inside a jack-o-lantern. The more mature your kids are, the more complicated the riddles can be.

Be warned, this activity takes some parental thought to make sure each clue leads to the next and not the wrong one! Having both a clue in the refrigerator and another in the freezer is not a good plan.  I speak from experience.

11. Write poems with a Halloween theme.

We love putting epitaph poems on paper tombstones in October. For older students, reading some Edgar Allen Poe or Emily Dickinson and trying to copy their style is a bigger challenge. If your student isn’t big on writing, reading The Raven, The Bells or Because I Did Not Stop for Death can all be a good poetry lesson. Encourage your kid to really lean in to the theatrics of the poem or look for versions on Youtube.

12. Graph Your Candy!

This spooky terrarium will add some whimsy to our homeschool space!

Whether you do a trunk or treat or go around your neighborhood have your child spread their candy out on a table and count up how many of each kind they got. Get them to consider if they can group some together. Is chocolate a category?  How about lollipops?  What makes sense for graphing purposes?  This is a great logic and reason activity and makes math more fun than most other ideas. I mean, there’s candy!

13. Make a graveyard themed terrarium.

Use a big glass jar, and layer in some rocks, dirt, and moss. Then have the kids make tiny tombstones from aluminum foil, clay, or popsicle sticks.  My kid covered popsicle sticks in foil to make some of hers. You can add more small plants and see how long you can keep it alive!

14.  Learn Anatomy

Use a decorative skeleton to go over the major bones of the body. Play a game to see if you can put one together again if you take it apart. Look for apps about the human skeleton.  Compare decorations of skeletons of different animals and humans. What parts are different?  Discuss which animals do not have skeletons but make fun decorations like spiders, insects, and octopus