Spooky Fun Middle School Writing Activities for the Month of October

If you’re looking for some spooky fun writing activities for the month of October, look no further. These two activities are a sure fire way to get even your most reluctant writers excited about writing.

Two Sentence Scary Stories

One of our favorite things to do on Halloween is to have our students practice writing two sentence spooky stories. They spend some time reading over the spooky stories we pull out from this awesome thread.  Note: you will need to make sure to pre-read the spooky stories you want to use, as not all are school appropriate. 

We recommend going through the site and pulling 10-15 (there are 150 - so you can pull more if you’re so inclined) of the two sentence scary stories. We then copy and paste all of the scary stories onto a doc and print them out. We make several copies of the doc and then cut each short story out into strips. From there, the students group up and they are given several different spooky stories to read over. Once your students have had time to read, discuss, and share the spooky stories they are then given these directions:

Rules:

1. Your story must be two sentences, and only two sentences. 

2. Your story must be spooky!

3. Be prepared to share out!

Wait for the magic to happen!

The Scariest Haunted House

Another favorite activity that we like to have our students complete during the month of October is The Scariest Haunted House. We got this idea from the artist Mari Andrew. She has an amazing Instagram account that is full of inspiring drawings that our students love to emulate. 

For this activity, we first have our students draw a haunted house. We like to use this how-to video. Once our student’s drawings are complete, we then project the image of Mari Andrew’s Scariest Haunted House (see image below). We read over the various encounters that Mari Andrew finds to be scary. Students discuss their favorites, and then they compile a list of their own. Once they have a good list of events, situations, and things that they find scary, they list them all over their haunted house. Now, if you wanted to be fancy AF you could have your students create their haunted houses on water color paper. Using a Sharpie, they could draw their house and write their scary haunted house lists. Last, they could water color paint over the drawing and words, to make their haunted houses look a lot like the original art. Spooky fun right? 

If you end up using either of these activities in your class, take some pictures and tag us in your IG stories or Tweets @theteachingdistillery…or even email them to us. We’d love to see these fun lessons in action!

Until next time teacher friends! Have a spooktacular October!