Welcome to our homeschool for little spooks this Halloween.
Our haunted house meets all the state requirements for being a haunted home school. We need your help to make our ordinary homeschool into a haunted home school for Halloween. Will you help?
History
Why, we’ll start with collecting some rubbings from tombstones. Be careful! Remember that is someone’s loved one under there! Place your rubbings over boxes or boards set out in your front yard.
Learning Comes Alive At The Cemetery On a cemetery visit, your child will discover fascinating facts, perceive connections, draw conclusions from comparing names and dates, and become more comfortable with this most integral facet of human life and culture.
The Real Prince Dracula Yes, there was a real Dracula, and he was a true prince of darkness. He was Prince Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad Tepes, meaning “Vlad the Impaler.” The Turks called him Kaziglu Bey, or “the Impaler Prince.”
Read The Legend of the Jack-O-Lantern and find out how Irish immigrants brought this story to America. According to Irish folklore a man named Jack, well known for his drunkenness and quick temper got very drunk at a local pub on All Hallows Eve. He met the Devil outside the pub because the Devil wanted his soul. Jack asked him for one more drink but he didn’t have the money to pay. Perhaps make a skit of it and act it out on Halloween!
Many, Many Mummies Some famous Incan mummies included children. At times of a drought or a famine, a a child would be offered to the gods as a sacrificial gift. Modern people love their pets and so did the Ancient Egyptians. They also loved them enough to make sure their beloved Fifi made it into the after world through the process of mummification!
Visit a Haunted House! A directory of haunted houses in the US and Canada. Some may be in historic buildings.
Visit a ghost town like this one in Bodie, California, that I and a bunch of other homeschoolers enjoyed one cool October day.
Drama and Costumes
Next, with a little science and art mixed together, we’ll work on some special effects from Halloween – Special effects.
Eric Baker: from Grady College to Walt Disney Imagineering
It should come as no surprise that the son of a building contractor and a junior high school art teacher, would spend time sewing and designing his own Halloween costumes at 8-years-old and molding his own Yoda masks a few years later; or, that he would grow up to work in the design playground of Walt Disney World.
How to Write a Horror Podcast
Today, we’re going to take you through coming up with horror podcast ideas, outlining your first season, and some strategies to add sounds to accentuate your storytelling. Sound good? Let’s get scary.
Top 20 Creepy Spooky Homemade Halloween Props & Decorations
From body parts in jars to floating candles, you’re sure to find some homemade Halloween props & decorations to jazz up your next Halloween party.
45 Simple, Last-Minute Halloween Costumes That Don’t Require a Trip to the Costume Store
You can come up with some very cool last-minute Halloween costumes using stuff you probably already have in your closet—with a quick trip to your craft stash for a few basic supplies.
Plan a ghoulish party and invite all your friends to come and get Goosebumps.
Home Economics
Cleaning your home in order to make it look neglected can be great fun. Just throw sheets over everything. Now, go into the kitchen and make some Gory Goodies for your family, friends and neighbors. There’s Drinks, Dips, Snacks, & Appetizers, Breads, Main Dishes, Desserts and Other Good Ideas.
Kraft has a witch cake recipe and some other spookie Halloween concoctions, too.
10 Last-Minute Halloween Costumes You Can Pull Straight From Your Closet The solution to finding a great costume for less? Creating looks with items you already own. Not only is this option budget-friendly, but it’s also sustainable (you avoid buying things you probably won’t wear again). For this, you’ll want to stick to iconic characters that are easily recognizable.
Science
Set up a mad scientist’s laboratory, and invite the trick-or-treaters to watch in amazement as you perform a variety of glowing and eerie tricks from Dr. Grovenstein & Igor’s Halloween Lecture Notes.
The Evil Mad Scientist of Silicon Valley has some real cool Halloween projects that involve some simple electronics anyone from about 10 years old and up can do. Components are available on the site to buy.
This is a good time of year to find skeletons for part of a unit study on anatomy. How about studying the nature of blood as well.
Have you observed how your pet handles Halloween? We love the holiday, and our kids especially love the sugar-induced frenzy of free candy, but our pets are not always so keen on the never-ending doorbell that preludes tiny monsters with chocolate-covered hands. It’s up to us to make sure they feel comfortable and ensure their safety. Along with your scarecrow and infinite bags of candy this year, make sure these five tips are on your checklist.
Before you carve your pumpkin, have children guess if a pumpkin will sink or float when out in a tub of water. Have them justify their guesses. Put the pumpkin or pumpkins in the tub. What happens? How do the children explain this? Does this hold true for all pumpkins, or does it vary? Why?
Art
Crochet a Pumpkin Bag
The Treat Me Crochet Bag is a free crochet pattern for a pumpkin treat bag. In Fall pumpkin colors this pumpkin treat crochet bag would make a fantastic treat bag or accessory to your costume!
Set up black lights around your house. Beneath the lights “paint” some spooky pictures or things like “Boo!” using liquid Tide. The stuff that makes Tide “whiter than white” will also make it glow under black light. [Note: Tide may be effective in repelling ants around your home when washed off the walls.]
How To Carve a Pumpkin for Halloween: The Easiest Method Before you lop off the top of that pumpkin and grab a handful of gooey squash guts, take a look through our basic guide to carving the best Halloween pumpkin. Follow these steps and you’ll end up with a cute and classic jack-o’-lantern with easy, no-fuss cleanup afterwards.
Olaf Pumpkin-Carving Template
Create your own jack-o’-lantern inspired by the lovable snowman from Disney’s Frozen. The great thing about this version of Olaf? He won’t melt.
Grab our Spongebob pumpkin carving pattern. Cut out the black parts.
World Culture
Costumes need not be scary. Consider wearing the native costume of a person from another country, perhaps those of your ancestors or of a land where you might have a penpal or want to travel to some day.
Careers
Dress up in the uniform or usual attire of someone you aspire to become some day.
Health
5 Makeup Tips To Save Your Complexion This Halloween
Prepping your skin is a crucial step anytime you do your makeup, but especially when you want it to last through all your Halloween festivities!
PE
Consider having a Run Like Hell race with your friends, in costumes, around a local cemetery. They really do this in Cincinnatti!
Literature
Years ago children used to sit by the radio and listen to spooky stories on the Mercury Theater. Today, you can download these old shows and listen on your computer.
Another favorite series children love are the Tales of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Older students will enjoy reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” which first appeared in the United States Saturday Post (The Saturday Evening Post) on August 19, 1843, serves as a reminder for all of us. The capacity for violence and horror lies within each of us, no matter how docile and humane our dispositions might appear. – By Martha Womack. Another spooky favorite to read on Halloween is “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Read the Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Washington Irving’s classic American short story.
Read some Ghost stories and strange folktales of the American South, told by the region’s most celebrated storytellers along the moonlit road.
Language Arts
Halloween Jokes can help teach parts of speech and things like homonyms and words with two meanings. Why didn’t the skeleton want to go to school? His heart wasn’t in it.
Write a story about fall on this lined fall paper for primary students or on this lined stationery for older kids. Here’s two other papers to choose from: candy corn Halloween paper for beginners and slightly older kids.
Music and Sound Effects
Consider some eerie music from our affiliate, Amazon.com:
- Halloween Bash
- Halloween – Mannheim Steamroller
- Spooky Favorites
- Halloween Howls
Math
Here’s some Halloween Worksheets, including many for math facts. You could create similar puzzles for your child at their math level.
When you have collected all the candy you can, sort the candy by brand and put in columns next to each other. On graph paper, color one square in a column for each type. Label the column. Does your graph of actual candy bars look like the one using equal sized squares? Why doesn’t it? Come up with a guess (an hypothesis) about why one candy bar was favored by your neighbors.
Pumpkin Facts
Pumpkins make everyone think of fall and fall holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. But did you know that pumpkins are healthy to eat? Do you know how long it takes a pumpkin to grow? Did you know there are many different kinds of pumpkins?
Estimate how many seeds are in your pumpkin. Put the first handful of seeds in a 1/4 cup measuring cup. Count them. Put these seeds and all the rest of the seeds in the biggest measuring device you have in the kitchen. How many 1/4 cups of pumpkin seeds is in that cup or bowl? Multiply the number of seeds in the first measurement times the number of 1/4 cups in all. You will have a pretty good estimate of the total number of seeds your pumpkin had.
Activism
Donate half your candy to a worthy children’s shelter or shelter for battered women and their families.
Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF and help the world’s poorer children.
Five Reasons Why Humans Need Halloween
HScientifically validated reasons to celebrate the scary things in life.
