Education insights | Features and updates
Seven spooky ways to celebrate Halloween with your students using LanSchool
October 28, 2021
The chance to organize fun holiday activities with your students is one of the joys of the school year, especially after spending so many months learning virtually.
In today’s digitally enhanced classroom, you’re no longer limited to physical crafts. Here are seven fun, digital Halloween-season activities you can try with your students:
- Engage in spooky storytelling.
Practicing storytelling skills is not only fun for students — it’s valuable for helping them learn to organize information, adapt their creativity to fit structural guidelines, and hone their presentation skills.
Give students the opportunity to create an original storybook about a creepy creature, using Book Creator. You can have students work independently or in pairs, with one student serving as the writer and one as the illustrator to practice collaboration skills.
When students have finished their books, have them present their stories to the rest of the class using LanSchool’s Show Student screen broadcasting feature.
- Create candy tycoons.
Help your students discover their entrepreneurial side while also giving them a chance to stretch their creativity.
Ask students to invent a new Halloween candy that will take the world by storm. Their original candy concepts should include not only the design for the candy itself but its packaging, name, and an advertising slogan.
Once everyone has their original candy concept ready to share, use LanSchool’s Vote feature to play “This or That,” doing a showdown between two candies at a time until there is one winner left.
- Bite in to vampire math.
Understanding basic statistics is a valuable skill for older students to have going into their college years. If you can make learning stats fun, they’ll take those lessons with them throughout their lives.
Leverage this digital lesson plan devised by Microsoft to walk students through answering the question: Do vampires really exist? This lesson, as described by Microsoft, uses mathematics and computer tools to “identify and extend a number pattern into very large values, create and interpret a graph, and compare a math model with real-world statistics.”
Use LanSchool to broadcast your screen to students as you complete this lesson together as a class.
- Surprise students with a Halloween video.
Part of the fun of holiday classroom activities is that they provide a break from the norm.
Lean in to the “trick” part of “trick or treat” by interrupting students with a Halloween-themed video, using LanSchool’s Push Website feature to send kids’ devices to the video when they’re not expecting it.
You can choose an educational video, or make your own silly Halloween video to inspire an even bigger reaction.
- Test students’ social knowledge.
Not every classroom activity has to be educational. Sometimes there’s value in helping students connect socially.
Ask each student to use LanSchool’s Messaging feature to secretly tell you the Halloween costume from years’ past that they were most proud of. If you have students who don’t participate in Halloween, ask them to share a cartoon or movie character they like.
Then, read each costume out loud and ask students to guess who each one belonged to.
- Turn students into virtual zombies.
Quizzes are an important part of gauging students’ understanding. Change up the delivery format of your next quiz by incorporating it into a digital game.
Throughout the day, use LanSchool’s Blank Screen feature at random intervals to broadcast a digital image of a zombie. When students see the digital image, they have to freeze in a zombie position. The last student to freeze has to answer a quiz question out loud.
If they don’t know the answer, they can tap in another student to help, but in exchange, the original student has to stay frozen like a zombie for two minutes.
- Broaden kids’ Halloween horizons.
The United States isn’t the only place that celebrates Halloween. Strengthen kids’ research skills while also broadening their cultural horizons.
Break kids into small groups and assign each group a country that celebrates Halloween. Ask kids to create a PowerPoint presentation that covers how Halloween is celebrated in that country, highlighting ways in which their country’s celebrations differ from ours.
Have each group present their findings using LanSchool’s Show Student feature. Give extra points to the group with the most exciting presentation.
Have your own spooky celebrations in store?
Let us know how you’re celebrating Halloween in your classroom — reach out with your photos on Twitter or Facebook: @LanSchool.
