How to Plan the best party with Halloween Classroom Activities!

The Halloween class party…kids look forward to it for weeks, and it’s usually up to the parents to organize it and pull it off. The key to a successful and amazing party is the use of Halloween Classroom Activities.

As a room parent for my son’s class, it’s my job to plan, organize, and run the Halloween party for his class. The first time I was a room parent, I was completely overwhelmed!

How would I possibly keep 20+ kids occupied in a reasonably organized manner for an hour?

Thankfully, I had great mentors in other parents who had done the job many times and had learned so much through experience! They kindly shared their mistakes and their successes with me.

Now I want to pass that on to other parents and help them where I struggled.

At our school, the kids march in a school-wide parade from 2 pm until 2:30 pm. This is their opportunity to show off their costumes, and they revel in it! Even the parents take off the afternoon from work to come see the parade!

The parties begin promptly at 2:30 and run until 3:30, when the kids pack up to be dismissed for the day. That’s where I and the other room parents come in.

In this post, I will show you how I structure the parties I run.

How to Organize and Plan a Great Classroom Halloween Party

For the younger grades (I currently have a 4th grader, a 2nd grader, and a 1st grader), I believe that the party works best when there is a balance between activity, crafts, and food.

Food

I have learned through experience that Halloween is an incredibly exciting holiday for kids.

So exciting, in fact, that many of them skip eating the healthier, heartier foods in favor of the treats and sweets that seem to take over at Halloween.

That being said, I like to provide heartier, more main dish-type of food at the Halloween parties in case the kids don’t eat much of a dinner so that they can get out for trick or treating.

Ideas from the past include: hot dogs or sausages wrapped like mummies; Jack-o-lantern cheese quesadillas; meat, cheese, and cracker platters; pizza and bread sticks; taco bar; and nacho bar.

I also like to include side dishes as well, usually in some form of fruits and veggies. These could include: fruit and veggie platters, fruits and veggies with dip, or some Halloween-themed version of fruits and veggies.

Next, what would the holiday be without a few treats? I have found that parents often like to send in these items. Ideas include: cupcakes; sugar cookies that the kids can decorate with frosting and sprinkles; and “worms in dirt”.

Games and Activities

I personally love to do pumpkin bowling. Set up rolls of toilet paper (decorated like ghosts or monsters or other Halloween icons) and roll a small pumpkin.

Other hits include “hot pumpkin” (which is played just like “hot potato” except the kids are tossing a small plastic pumpkin to each other), pin the eyes or mouth on the monster, monster bingo, and “Don’t Eat Pete”.

Less active activities include crafts and activity sheets such as word scrambles, word searches and puzzles.

What does setup look like?

I usually divide the class into 4 groups to correlate with the 4 stations or tables I have: 1 food table, 1 craft table, 2 activity stations.

This can all be adjustable. If you have more kids or fewer kids, more activities you want to incorporate, more volunteers you want to give a job to, etc. I am just giving you a basic party set up idea that you can adapt to you needs 🙂