Halloween writing activities offer so many opportunities to engage students in the writing process! If you’re looking for a fresh approach to narrative writing, why not have students put a spooky spin on a classic fairy tale? Reimagining Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a scary story can help students explore the elements of creative writing while capturing the spirit of the season.
🧠 Encouraging Student Creativity in Halloween Writing
One of the main benefits of this activity is that it encourages students to think outside the box. By starting with a story they already know, students can focus on the fun part—adding their own scary twist. Whether they’re describing the creaking of a door, the howling of the wind, or the eeriness of an empty house, they’ll learn how to use language to create a mood and draw readers into their stories.
🎃 Exploring Narrative Writing with a Halloween Theme
One of the great things about narrative writing is that it allows students to express their creativity while learning important storytelling techniques. By transforming a familiar story into a suspenseful, spine-chilling narrative, students get the chance to focus on:
- Dialogue: Developing conversations that reveal more about the characters and move the story forward.
- Sensory Language: Using descriptions that appeal to the senses, helping readers feel like they’re right in the middle of the action.
- Character Development: Showing characters’ thoughts, actions, and feelings to create vivid personalities on the page.
This activity not only makes the writing process more engaging, but it also gives students the tools they need to create immersive, imaginative stories.
📚 Scary Read-Alouds for Halloween Writing Inspiration
To get inspired before the students begin drafting their own terrifying Halloween writing, consider reading aloud one or more books below and discussing the authors’ techniques to immerse the reader in all things scary! Links below are Amazon affiliate links:
- The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler
- Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- The Witches by Roald Dahl
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
- The Dark by Lemony Snicket
- Coraline by Neil Gaiman
- The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi
- The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda D. Williams
- Moldilocks and the Three Scares: A Zombie Tale by Lynne Marie and David Rodriguez Lorenzo
📝 Flexible Ways to Incorporate the Halloween Writing Activity
Whether you have a whole week to dedicate to writing or just a day or two, this narrative writing activity is designed to be flexible. Here are a few ways to adapt it to your classroom:
- Mini-Lessons on Key Writing Skills: Focus on specific areas like adding suspenseful sensory details or crafting a strong ending. These mini-lessons can be integrated into your existing writing curriculum or used as stand-alone activities.
- Short Writing Assignments: Not enough time for a full story? Have students work on shorter pieces, like creating a character sketch for a spooky version of Goldilocks or writing a suspenseful scene using scary sentence starters.
- Independent Writing Projects: If you have more time, students can work through the entire writing process to produce a complete narrative. This can be done over several days or spread out as part of your Halloween celebration.
⏰ A Low-Prep, High-Impact Halloween Writing Activity
As a teacher, you’re always looking for activities that are engaging but don’t require hours of prep. This activity allows you to focus on teaching important writing skills without spending too much time planning. Whether you’re assigning it as part of a writing block or using it as a quick creative break, students will enjoy the chance to create something spooky while practicing their narrative writing.
Halloween is a great time to let students stretch their imaginations, and adding a scary twist to a well-known tale is an easy way to make narrative writing more exciting. This activity not only taps into their creativity, but it also helps them develop important writing skills that they’ll use in their writing throughout the year – like orienting the reader, adding vivid sensory details, creating interesting dialogue, structuring their stories, and more!
⚙️ Bridging STEM and Narrative Writing ✏️ – A Collaborative Approach for Teachers
The writing process and the engineering design process go together like peanut butter & jelly! They have so much in common. Both require creative problem-solving, iterative thinking, and refining ideas based on feedback. This makes narrative writing projects an exciting opportunity for collaboration between classroom teachers and STEM specialists. By combining their expertise, teachers can engage students in a comprehensive learning experience that blends storytelling with hands-on engineering challenges.
The Writing Process Meets the Engineering Design Process
In the classroom, students focus on the key elements of narrative writing, including character development, dialogue, and sensory language. Meanwhile, STEM specialists can take those story elements and turn them into design challenges for students to solve using the engineering design process. Here’s how the two processes align:
- Brainstorming and Planning: Just as writers brainstorm ideas and outline their stories, engineers generate ideas and plan their designs before starting a project.
- Drafting and Prototyping: Writers create a first draft, while engineers build prototypes to test their ideas.
- Revising and Improving: Both processes involve refining and revising. Writers improve their stories based on feedback, and engineers iterate on their prototypes to make them better.
- Publishing and Presenting: Writers share their final stories, and engineers present their completed designs, explaining their thinking and problem-solving strategies.
STEM Challenges Based on Students’ Stories
Once students have developed the elements of their spooky Goldilocks story, STEM teachers can guide them through designing and building props related to their Halloween writing. By setting up criteria and constraints, students can design creative solutions to problems found within their stories. Here are some ideas for integrating STEM challenges into the narrative Halloween writing process:
- Bone Bridge® STEM Challenge: In a spooky twist, Goldilocks must travel across a Bone Bridge®. Students can design and build a bridge that supports her weight, using materials found in a makerspace or classroom.
- The Throne of Bones: Instead of a cozy chair, Goldilocks encounters three chairs, one of which is a bone throne. Students could design the perfect creepy throne, considering both aesthetic and structural integrity.
- Eyeball Goblet: In one possible version of the story, Goldilocks drinks from three glasses, with one being a goblet filled with eyeballs. Students could design a goblet that meets specific design constraints (like size or materials) while being both spooky and functional.
Makerspace Collaboration and Peer Challenges
Encourage students to create their own STEM challenges based on the elements of their stories, allowing them to build props and use them during peer presentations of their Halloween writing. You can set up a makerspace stocked with a variety of materials to foster creativity and collaboration. Students could work in teams to complete the challenges created by other groups, adding an interactive, peer-driven component to the project.
This integrated approach brings STEM and narrative writing together, offering students a more immersive and engaging learning experience. It also allows teachers to leverage each other’s strengths and create a cross-curricular project that students will remember long after Halloween.
By incorporating both narrative Halloween writing and hands-on STEM challenges, you’ll not only enhance student learning but also inspire creativity across subjects. Whether students are writing, designing, building, or presenting, they’ll practice important skills that connect the worlds of storytelling and engineering.
Save Time – Pick Up the Halloween Writing Resource Today!
You can create your own mini lessons, templates, checklists & rubric, but why reinvent the wheel when you could be use that time to figure out your Halloween costume instead?
Looking for More Engaging Halloween Activity Ideas?
Check out these blog posts:
Pin Me