My favourite writing activity for the end of October is to write persuasive and descriptive Haunted House ads for prospective monsters.
If you are looking for a writing activity that your students will absolutely love doing, it’s this one!
Lesson Plan: Descriptive Haunted House
Introduction: First I like to read some local house ads online to give students some familiarity with the wordings and things to look out for. We talk about who might this house attract? What are some selling features that stood out to you? etc.
Front-loading Vocabulary: After introducing their writing activity, I like to build a brain map with some unique vocabulary that students might choose to use in their Haunted House descriptions. Words like “spooky”, “bloody”, “creaky”, “draught”, “cauldron”, “vampire blood”, etc. I might even draw small pictures next to some of the words to help my EAL kids (things like a bat, moon, headstone… you know.. the easy to draw things haha)
Writing: Here comes the assignment. I ask my students to keep a few things in mind:
- Who are you trying to attract (let’s keep context in mind). Would this house be suitable for a witch? Why? Monsters? Why? Vampires? Why?
- You must list 3-4 key features of the house. Extra creaky floorboards? Awesome. Broken windows? Wonderful!
- A catchy title to grab your attention. We love alliterations if possible!
Students are usually given between 2-3 classes to write up their 5ish sentence ad for their Haunted House. Once their rough draft is complete, then they create the good and final copy.
Then, in art class, we create these Haunted House silhouettes in black oil pastels and watercolour backgrounds to match our advertisements.
Once the artwork and writing is complete, they can choose to put it on a black or orange piece of construction paper to really make it pop.
Such creative juices flowing in these advertisements. You can really tell the students thought about the prospective buyers!
These kind of writing lessons, the ones where you don’t have to beg your students to write, but it’s literally the other way around… those are the lessons that are my favourite to teach :).
More Halloween Activities?
Continue the Halloween fun with my Solve the Room activity where students need to correct identify the place values (up to 10 000) in order to answer the fun Halloween riddles. Once they’ve answered the riddles correctly, they can colour their map and escape their Haunted Ghoul school!
Students absolutely love the silly riddles and escaping from zombies from their Haunted school, plus it gets them out of their desks but still on task covering curricular outcomes!
There you go! Halloween writing activity in the morning, and Haunted Place Value math activity in the afternoon! Enjoy!
Maryana
