Ashleigh's Education Journey

Helpful 3rd – 5th Grade Teaching Resources

Surviving The Day AFTER Halloween

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I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the only days more challenging than Halloween is the day AFTER Halloween.  There is nothing quite like a room full of children who’ve eaten nothing but candy over the past 24 hours.  I’ve heard many teachers say that November 1st should be a school holiday, and I think that sounds like a great idea!  However, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, so I’ve tried to find ways to work with it, rather than against it.

In this post I’ve shared of few of my favorite activities for keep students engaged and on task the day after Halloween. Of course, you can squeeze these in any time! You don’t have to wait!  You can find all of the activities here.

Nutrition Facts Math

In the activity, students use information from real nutrition facts labels for their favorite types of candy to solve math word problems. The questions cover estimation, addition, subtraction, and multiplication. There are also a few multi-step problems, which are always a need.

Halloween Candy Characteristics

Another fun Halloween activity is a scientific observations practice where students choose two types of candy and describe characteristics of the candy. Then, students create a Venn-Diagram that sorts their Halloween candy into the two characteristics. You can even point out the importance of facts vs opinions in this type of activity. In the example below, “yummy” would not work for a scientific observation.

Halloween Descriptive Writing

Students can also write a descriptive writing paragraph about a piece of candy. This is great to tie in visualizing and sensory images! I included a few different forms, because it seems like every year my students need something different for writing. You have have students read the descriptive paragraph and try to guess what type of candy was being described.

Halloween Candy Graphs

No day after Halloween would be complete without having students graph their candy. If you do this, you may want to remind students to bring some of their Halloween candy to school. I don’t have students graph every type of candy they have. If students don’t have candy, they may work in groups or use extra candy. To make this activity more advanced, have students use the graph to write additive and multiplicative comparison statements.

Halloween Economics

I didn’t want to skip social studies, so there is also a supply and demand lesson on Halloween items. Students compare the prices of Halloween goods before and after Halloween. You’ll need a few ad pages from a newspaper or magazine for this. I like to have a few from early October and then get a few from the newspaper the day after Halloween. It amazes students to see the difference in prices before and after Halloween.

Trying to figure out what to do with your students the day AFTER Halloween? We teachers know that kids who have been eating nothing but Halloween candy for a solid day probably aren't in a very academic mood, but these activities will put that candy to use by helping them learn! Click through to check out these math and English language arts activities for upper elementary!

Halloween STEM-Pumpkin Catapult

There is a Halloween STEM activity with a pumpkin catapult. Originally, I planned to use mini pumpkins for this activity, but I chickened out and bought pumpkin candy corn.

Hopefully this will make the transition of going back to a regular school day a little easier for the students and teachers. Maybe these Day after Halloween lessons and activities will help it be a fun (or tolerable) day after all!

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