Teaching upper elementary students how to understand Halloween idioms offers teachers many opportunities to incorporate fun activities into their classrooms. I recently taught my own students 24 commonly used Halloween idioms and phrases and it was a blast!
Digital Task Cards Activity
It’s never too early to start celebrating Halloween with kids so use that enthusiasm to your benefit with a fun Halloween idioms game using digital task cards. Create a set of commonly used idioms and phrases to display using PowerPoint or Google Slides. Display the task cards one at a time using your interactive whiteboard so everyone can see. I formatted my digital task cards so there were 3 multiple choice items to choose from as a possible answer. Since we practiced this review at the end of a long day, I decided to raise the energy level by creating fun ways for students to respond.
- if they thought the answer was letter A – they had to dab
- if they thought the answer was letter B – they had to jump up and shout, “Boo!”
- if they thought the answer was letter C – they had to floss
Once students made their selection, I would show them the answer on the next slide, which was a cause for celebration if you had the right answer. The engagement level was through the roof on this activity, but still controlled and focused as they had to settle themselves down quickly before I would advance to the next task card.
More Practice with Digital Task Cards
Later in the week, while I taught small groups, I gave my students independent practice by sharing the digital task cards through our Google Classroom. Students could study the Halloween idioms and phrases on their own with this approach. This gave them much-needed extra practice before they completed the self-checking version of the task cards in Google Forms, which I used as our assessment.
Halloween Idioms Bingo Game
Another fun way to practice idioms is by creating a set of Bingo boards. You can download and print a set of free game boards from this website that would be a fun alternative to worksheets. I wrote a post earlier about the wisdom of having a classroom game basket stocked and ready to go with your students. If you have this in place, then you should be good to go with your Halloween idioms practice.
Fun Activities Review
These are just a few ideas to get you started with celebrating the Halloween season without sacrificing precious instructional time. If you want the complete set of ready-made 24 Halloween Idioms and Phrases Digital Task cards that I used with my students, you can purchase them at my TpT store – The Reflective Educator.
Otherwise, you can make the free set of Bingo boards linked earlier in the post. You could also do a quick YouTube search and find some videos that way, but be sure you watch them in advance. A lot of videos I found had Halloween idioms that included “hell” as some of their phrases, which probably won’t work in a classroom setting. Whatever activity you choose, your kids are sure to have fun and learn a lot. Happy Teaching!
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