Spooky STEAM Halloween Learning Centers
Halloween will be here before we know it, and we’ve got four super spooky STEAM center ideas sure to give your students shivers! Okay, they’re not that scary, but they are fun – and festive! Check out the ideas below to create quick and easy Halloween-themed centers using affordable, reusable magnets:
Tangram Pumpkins!
Perfect for Halloween, pre-K and kinder students will love The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin, a sweet story with an important lesson about accepting each other’s differences.
Give it a read during story time, then let your students use colorful Foam Fun Magnet Tangrams to design their own unique mosaic-inspired square pumpkins on your whiteboard or on their personal dry-erase lapboards.
Each bucket of magnetic tangrams comes with 56 soft, easy-to-grasp pieces, plenty to go around. Plus, building with magnetic tangrams helps students develop fine-motor skills, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, and other early math concepts.
Host a Haunted House!
Encourage early engineering with a center including everything your students need to create their own magnetic haunted houses!
The Wonderboard STEAM Architect Magnet Set includes 150 flexible, magnetic, architectural elements and a double-sided dry erase board.
Kids can use the pieces to construct a towering, winding, or otherwise haunted house.
You can even use a dry-erase marker to color in the windows yellow or draw ghost faces on the windows.
Don’t forget to add your homemade magnetic bat and pumpkin counters (see below) for a festive touch!
Creepy Crawly Counters!
Combine art and math for a spooky STEAM lesson your students will love!
Divide your class into sections and have some students color mini pumpkin printouts, while others color bats and candy corn. Laminate, then cut them out, and adhere magnet dots or magnet strip to them.
Presto! Your students have just created their own sets of Halloween counters perfect for us on magnetic lapboards for October lessons on grouping, counting, operations, sorting, matching, sequencing, and patterning.
Convenience-factor tip: our magnetic dots and magnetic strip already come with peel-and-stick adhesive—save yourself and your students a lot of time and headaches!
Want to also DIY some lighter or heavier weight seasonal decor to match your new homemade counters? No problem!
Pick up our Magnetic Arts & Crafts Bundle, which includes magnetic dots, strip, tape, and two different shapes of raw ceramic magnets.
Munchy Monster Mouth!
Add a touch of the terrifying to your whole-class lessons with a scary monster mouth! Holding a piece of construction paper horizontally, cut out a large oval from its center, creating what sort of looks like a frame. Cut out and glue on a set of big fangs around the edges of the center cutout. Then decorate the frame any way you would like.
Use your new monster mouth frame to draw focus to any important information you want to highlight on your bulletin board, wall, or whiteboard.
If you have our Magnetic Demonstration 0-120 Chart, you can do something similar and add a bit of mystery to your more than/less than math activities for the season!
Draw some construction paper fangs, then cut them out and cellophane tape them to the back of the “more/less” magnet frame piece that is included in your 0-120 chart set, and/or you could create a monster face around the outside of the magnet frame.
With big, quadrant pieces and bright colors, this chart is easy to build and easy to see from all around your classroom. Now with the added math monster mouth, it will be even more fun!
Magnets are an easy – and reusable way – to add some seasonal fun to your centers and classroom. Give these ideas a go this October and then start thinking creatively about how you might use the same magnetic products for winter-themed holiday centers, too!
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