Halloween is here, and so are its exciting classroom games. Many EFL & ESL students do not know about Halloween: the spooky holiday celebrated on October 31st. If you want to involve your students in another special and fun learning experience, take the advantage of this occasion and use our eight most engaging Halloween games for your ESL and EFL classes. With these games, your class will have a much better knowledge of Halloween and improve their English skills.
Most Engaging ESL/EFL Class Halloween Games :
1- Halloween Bingo:
If you want to test your English students’ listening skills as well as their memory regarding Halloween-related vocabulary, you should definitely try out Halloween Bingo. This game brings a spooky twist to the original Bingo. The instructors have to provide each student with a black Bingo board.
Ask them to sketch a Halloween item in each empty box. After that, play each round just the way you play Bingo. But this time, you have to call out Halloween items instead of numbers.
If a student has the picture of that item on his/her board, s/he will mark it. The first student to mark five items on his/her board wins the game. (Tip: Before starting this game, you will have to review Halloween-related vocabulary with the students, which can be done with the help of the fun game below.)
2- What am I ?
This game will help your ESL students to practice the usage of descriptive words and also learn Halloween-related vocabulary. Give a student a card with a Halloween picture and ask him/her to describe that Halloween item without revealing its name. The other students of the class have to guess the Halloween item in the picture, and the student who guesses it correctly wins a point. Each student will get a chance to describe a specific picture. In the end, the student with the most points wins and gets a prize (Halloween sticker or candy.)
3- Three Things :
If you’d like to focus on the creative writing abilities of your students, you can try out 3 Things. In this game, you have to put your students in pairs and each student has to come up with three random words related to Halloween for their partner. After that, the students in pairs have to come up with an interesting Halloween story using those three words and present their story in front of the class. The students will vote for the best story and the pair that comes up with the best story wins the game.
4- Haunted House Brochures:
Many people love going to haunted houses during Halloween. Ask your students to share their Halloween haunted house experience and how they felt when they visited a haunted house. After that, assign your students into groups of three and have them design a brochure for their own haunted house. The students should use descriptive words and adjectives related to Halloween while describing their haunted house in the brochure. They can also include pictures or drawings. When they are done, display all the brochures in the class and have the students vote for the best one. The group that designs the best brochure wins and gets a treat.
5- Monster Guts:
Monster guts is an interesting game that helps determine how much knowledge your students have regarding adjectives and figurative language. The game is a sensory game where students have to feel spooky items placed in boxes and describe them using adjectives and figurative language. Take some empty boxes and add in each box wet grapes (zombie’s eyes), boiled pasta (monster brain), sticks wrapped in tissue (mummy bones), and more.
6- Candy Taste Test:
This game will test your students’ knowledge of comparative and superlative adjectives. After reviewing with your students the formation of these adjectives, bring in three types of Halloween candies. Ask each student to taste all three candies and later ask them to compare all three candies in terms of taste. For example, “this candy tastes better than the first one,” or “this candy tastes the best.” Also, tell them to write about why that specific candy is the best, using descriptive words and adjectives.
7- Monster Role Play:
In this game, you have to assign a scary situation to students in groups. The situation can be anything related to Halloween, such as “a mummy is chasing you,” or “a zombie wants to eat your lunch.” Ask them to share what they would do if they were in such a situation using modal verbs.
8- Remember This:
While discussing ESL class Halloween games, Remember This is a must-mention. In this game, you have to gather some small Halloween items (such as rubber pumpkin, spooky mask, paper bat, etc.) and put them in a tray. Show the tray to all the students and cover the tray. Ask the students to remember as many items as they can. After that, ask each student to stand up and tell the names of the items they remember. Also, tell them to spell the items correctly. This will test their memory as well as punctuation. The student who remembers most items and spells them correctly wins the game.
