Take the time to celebrate the fall with these many, many, many October holiday activities and ideas!
October is a month of cool weather, spooky costumes, corn (both the vegetable and the candy variety), and many other fun and delicious traditions.
It is a delightful month to celebrate for a variety of reasons. In this post, we want to help you get your thinking caps on and introduce you to some ideas for celebrating October holidays that you may not have considered before!
Let’s start by talking about some ways to celebrate some less well-known October holidays!
October Holiday Activities and Suggestions
National Techies Day (October 3rd)
With so many tech tools out there for kids, there are plenty of ways to celebrate National Techies Day.
You could organize a coding challenge, have a discussion about the importance of technology and its importance on society, or students could even do research on famous technology contributors.
I love the idea of having students create on this day, so consider what you might have available to you that students could play around with. Is there a 3D printer in your school that students could use to design something? Do you have any game-building tools they could play with? Ask around and see what you already have that you can let students play around with as you celebrate this lesser-known holiday!
National Taco Day (October 4th)
Well, I think we probably need to be making tacos on National Taco Day! What do you think?
One way to celebrate this tasty holiday is by arranging a taco-making competition. Bring in all the goods, let students create unique taco recipes, and present them to the class. Encourage each student to bring a ‘special ingredient’ they can add to their taco.
Given the Mexican origins of this food that is enjoyed worldwide, it may be a good day to talk about the origins of the taco. This is a great time to talk about Mexican cuisine and culture!
World Teachers Day (October 5th)
Plan a student-led assembly to honor teachers, including performances, speeches, and presentations highlighting the importance of education.
You can also pull out some of your favorite teacher appreciation activities, such as writing notes of appreciation to teachers or asking students to write memoirs about some of their favorite interactions with their teachers over the years.
Curious Events Day (October 9th)
What a fun holiday to celebrate! This world is full of interesting people and places that some might describe as ‘curious.’ To celebrate this holiday, you could organize a “Curiosity Fair” where students showcase projects related to curious events, such as experiments, models, or presentations.
As a part of Curious Events Day, you could also play around with the idea of being curious in general. Students could be curious while solving a puzzle or mystery or even discussing the topics they are most curious about.
If you’d like to incorporate a little more writing, you could assign a creative writing activity where students write a story or poem about a curious event that they witnessed or imagined.
National Farmers’ Day (October 12th)
Invite a local farmer or agricultural expert to speak to the students about farming on National Farmers’ Day! These farmers could be from anywhere; in fact, consider trying to connect with a different kind of farmer each day for a week!
Students can also become farmers themselves by starting a garden/planting project at school. By planting a small vegetable garden in the classroom, students can learn about the process of growing, caring for, and harvesting crops.
National Chocolate Covered Insect Day (October 14th)
This one is so much fun! Over the last several years, eating insects as a food source has become much more mainstream. See if you can get your hands on some of these foods to try in class.
Talk about the pros and cons of consuming insects with students and see if any of them have ever tried any before. Students can even look up recipes for consuming insects and join up with the high school cooking classes to try one of them out!
National Dictionary Day (October 16th)
If there ever was a day to bust out and dust off the ol’ dictionary, this is it.
Although we grew up looking up ideas in the dictionary, many of your students may not have ever even seen one.
Give students some time to explore the dictionary on this National Dictionary Day. Maybe even give them a sheet of information (like a Dictionary Scavenger Hunt) to look up and practice using it.
National New Friends’ Day (October 19th)
I love the timing of this holiday because it has probably been a month and a half since you did a get-to-know-you activity with students, and this is another good time to pull one out.
I like the idea of doing a group project or icebreakers on National New Friends Day that emphasizes what students have in common. If you can find a good ice breaker where students have to move around and stand by others with similar interests to themselves, that would give them a chance to talk with people they might not talk to on a daily basis.
National New Friends’ Day would also be a great day to start writing to a pen pal!
International Sloth Day (October 20th)
Who wants to learn more about sloths? As these are very unexpected and unassuming creatures, they don’t always get a lot of love from students. Maybe on this International Sloth Day, your student could conduct a research project where students learn about different sloth species, their habitats, and adaptations or create a sloth-inspired art project where students use various art mediums to draw or paint sloths in their natural habitats.
Since sloths are known for how slow they move, it could also be fun to play around with slow-motion videos on this day as well!
National Croc Day (October 23rd)
Yep! There’s a day for that. National Croc Day! To celebrate this interesting shoe, consider doing a design activity where students design their own type of special shoe that will ‘take the world by storm,’ kind of like how Crocs have done.
Students could also spend some time learning about what makes Crocs such a sensation. This could culminate in each group creating an audio/visual presentation that could act as a commercial for Crocs.
National Day of the Deployed (October 26th)
On this holiday, spend some time discussing the significance of the day and the contributions and sacrifices made by deployed service members.
As an act of appreciation and support, ask students to write letters or create care packages to send to deployed military personnel.
If you have the time to set it up, you could also invite a guest speaker who is a military service member or veteran to share their experiences and answer students’ questions.
National Candy Corn Day (October 30th)
Candy corn and Halloween go together like peanut butter and jelly, but candy corn is widely regarded as one of those candies that people either love or hate.
One of my favorite ideas for this holiday is to take a poll among your students. Who loves it, and who hates it? Do a little math project where students poll everyone around the school about their feelings toward candy corn and then create some graphs or charts documenting their findings.
Even if you don’t do the project, you can still use candy corn as a manipulative in some of your other math lessons on National Candy Corn Day. It works great for counting, sorting, and graphing activities!
This is also a great ‘how’s it made’ kind of holiday. See if you can find a video that shows how candy corn is made that you can share with students on this holiday!
Halloween (October 31st)
After talking about all of the super obscure holidays above, it seems odd to end the month on a holiday that is more widely known. Still, there are so many fun ways to celebrate Halloween in the classroom, including glow-in-the-dark math centers, candy-themed activities, costume parades and contests, scavenger hunts, and spooky science activities.
In this blog post, we talk about how you can use these Halloween Math Centers to create a glow-in-the-dark math center experience that your students are sure to remember!
October Holiday Reading Resources for Upper Elementary
It is always nice to have some October Holiday reading resources ready to go. I like the October Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts as a good foundational resource to use daily with students. These writing prompts will introduce students to the holiday of the day and ask them to write about the holiday. These writing prompts are great for formative assessments, working on specific grammar or writing skills, or just as a way to start the day.
The Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts is good for morning meetings, transitional activities, or as an after-lunch reset!
If you really like the October Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts, you can save money and celebrate the holidays every day with the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompt BUNDLE!!
A few other October holiday activities to have ready to go are these October Close Reads with Mystery Pictures, the Halloween Close Reads with Mystery Pictures, and these Halloween Sticker Style Activities!
The Halloween Close Reads with Mystery Pictures include passages about Halloween around the world and the history of Halloween as well as a fictional passage about a Celtic boy celebrating with his family where Halloween originated.
The October Close Reads with Mystery Pictures include passages about spider silk, bats, and a fictional story about a mouse living in a jack o’lantern.
Remember, every passage in our Close Reads with Mystery Pictures is differentiated and comes in 3 different levels to allow all of your learners to work at a level that works for them!
Digital ELA Activities for October
In addition to the reading and writing-based October holiday activities and resources, you can also integrate this Halloween Sticker Style Activity into your October centers and stations or as an individual or small-group activity. This digital, no-prep resource includes 30 ELA questions covering skills like figurative language, author’s purpose, point of view, main idea, and more, all with a fun Halloween theme!
Halloween Math Game Shows
These Halloween Math Game Shows are so much fun to add to your October holiday activities and celebrations. Whether you’re teaching 3rd-grade math, 4th-grade math, or 5th-grade math, these game shows are super fun and can be used in a variety of ways.
These game shows could also be a lot of fun to add to your glow games activities if you decide to go with a glow-in-the-dark-themed day in your classroom. Simply print the slides from your game show onto neon paper and use them however you see fit!
October is a fun month that kicks off the holiday season with a fun, spooky twist. Hopefully, some of these October holiday activities and ideas will spark a little creativity and get you thinking about all the ways you can celebrate October in your upper elementary classroom this year!
For even more monthly ideas, check out the full-year list of monthly blog posts below!
- January Holiday Activities and Ideas
- February Holiday Activities and Ideas
- March Holiday Activities and Ideas (Coming Soon)
- April Holiday Activities and Idea
- May Holiday Activities and Ideas
- June Holiday Activities and Ideas
- July Holiday Activities and Ideas
- August Holiday Activities and Ideas
- September Holiday Activities and Ideas
- October Holiday Activities and Ideas
- November Holiday Activities and Ideas
- December Holiday Activities and Ideas
