Fall and Halloween Activities for Kids

What follows is the stuff we actually reach for: games for the walk, three story starters for when nobody has an idea left, and free printables sorted by what a child can do right now rather than by what year they are in.

Preschoolers get the listening games. Kindergartners get their first Halloween words to read. Grade schoolers get bingo, word searches and the big words off the candy bags. Pick the one that matches your child, and skip the rest without guilt.

Listening games for the walk

Trick-or-treating is mostly walking. The doors are the good part; the stretch between them is where ours starts asking how many more houses. These fill that stretch, and there is nothing to carry.

First-sound hunt. Pick a sound and collect things that start with it. /p/ for pumpkin. Porch, path, plastic, popcorn, Peter from down the street. Say the sound rather than the letter name — /p/, a short puff, not pee — which is the one bit that takes practice for the grown-up, not the child.

Guess my word. Break a word into its sounds and let your child put it back together. Bat becomes /b/ /a/ /t/, and your child says bat. If they can say each sound but cannot get to the word, that is a real and common sticking point, and we wrote about it here: when a child can’t sound out words.

Count the sounds. Hold up a finger for each sound you hear. Bat has three. Ghost has four, because the h is silent. This is harder than it looks and we get it wrong regularly, which turns out to be the fun part.

Spot the word. Point at the words already around you: decorations, candy wrappers, costume tags, the sign on the door that says the bowl is self-serve. Put your finger under it, say it, keep walking. We tried making this a quiz once and it died on the spot. Candy wrappers work best: short, they repeat all night, and your child cares about them more than anything else you will point at.

These four are all one skill, and it has a name. If you want the version that is not tied to October, we put the five-minute games for the other eleven months in hearing the sounds inside words.

Make up a Halloween story together

Three starters, for the evening when everyone is tired of the same book:

• The pumpkin on the porch woke up.
• Something is living in the attic and it is not a squirrel.
• Your costume turned out to be real.

Then one question, over and over: and then what happened?

Take turns adding a sentence. Let it go somewhere ridiculous. Ours ends with the dog in charge roughly half the time. None of this needs a single written word.

If you would rather read one than invent one, Wonster Words keeps a shelf of seasonal books alongside its own original stories, which is where we go when it is late and nobody has an idea left.

Halloween games to play at home

Bingo. The one printable here that needs more than one player: an adult calls the words out loud and everybody plays at once. Each sheet has three boards and a set of caller cards. The kindergarten one uses the first words, the first grade one uses the words with two letters side by side.

Roll and read. Write six words in a row, number them 1 through 6, and your child rolls a die and reads whichever word they land on. The same six words keep coming back around, which should be dull and somehow is not, because the die is doing the work.

Matching pairs. Print the word cards twice, lay them face down, take turns flipping two over. This is the one that survives a rainy afternoon.

Mix the families. If your child breezes through bat, cat, hat, rat, shuffle in bug and net and hop. A child who is reading the words will handle it. A child who has memorized the shape of the page will stall. That is worth knowing, and it is not a failure.

If that is what you see most nights, remembering the pattern instead of reading the word is its own thing, and it has its own fix.

Make a word sound spooky

Stretch the middle. Every word has a vowel, the vowel is the part you can hold for as long as you have breath, and dragging it out is what makes a word sound like it is coming from under the porch.

Spooooooky. Ghooooost. Creeeeepy. Sneeeeaky. Booooooo. Mooooon.

Say it in your slowest, most drawn-out voice, let your child say it back, then say it together at normal speed. Let them pick which ones are worth stretching. Ours: spooky, ghost, creepy, sneaky, boo, moon, scary, slime, bones, gloom.

Some words stretch at the front too. M, f, s, n, l and v hold as long as you want, so moon can be mmmmoooon and snake can be ssssnaaaake. Both ends at once is the version that sounds most like a ghost.

Six sounds will not stretch at all — b, d, g, k, p and t — because they are over the instant they start. That is why boo stretches on the oo and not on the b. Try it and your child will hear the problem before you can explain it.

Which Halloween words can my child read?

The lists below are grouped by age and reading level, from words to say out loud with a preschooler to words a confident reader can sound out alone. Pick the group that fits your child, and borrow from the others whenever you like.