As supply teachers and support staff, integrating seasonal events & celebrations into your lessons is a fantastic way to keep students engaged and make learning fun. The period from October to December brings with it a host of opportunities to incorporate creative and educational activities linked to occasions such as Halloween, Diwali, Bonfire Night and Christmas. These festive periods provide ideal springboards for developing critical thinking, creativity, cultural understanding and cross-curricular connections for students of all ages.
Here’s how you can tie these upcoming events into meaningful lessons while reinforcing key educational concepts:
Halloween presents endless opportunities to tap into students’ creativity and imagination while embedding key learning objectives across various subjects.
Literacy & Creative Writing:
Spooky stories and themed writing tasks can enhance literacy skills, especially around descriptive writing, narrative structure, and vocabulary expansion. For younger students, writing a short Halloween story encourages them to develop sequencing and sentence structure. You could create a Halloween-themed “Word Wall” full of adjectives and verbs related to the season (e.g., eerie, flicker, shadow) and ask the students to incorporate these words to into stories or descriptive paragraphs. For older students, challenge them to craft mystery or horror tales, focusing on atmosphere, tension and character development.
STEM: Science & Maths
Halloween science experiments, such as creating “slime” or demonstrating chemical reactions (like a “bubbling cauldron” using baking soda and vinegar), can introduce scientific inquiry into lessons. Encourage hypothesis-building, experimentation and critical evaluation of results.
Maths can also be embedded into fun lesson tasks, such as calculating the area of a pumpkin patch or using Halloween-themed objects for data handling and graphing exercises. You could create a “Pumpkin Maths Lesson Challenge,” where students solve numerical problems based on pumpkin-related scenarios, like estimating the weight or calculating the volume of carved pumpkins. Incorporating these hands-on activities not only makes learning tangible but also helps build inquiry-based learning.
Music
Incorporate Halloween into music lessons by introducing students to spooky-themed music like Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach or Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. Ask your students to identify the instruments and then describe how composers create a sense of fear or suspense.
You could even ask your students to compose their own spooky soundtracks using percussion instruments and experimenting with creating eerie sound effects using bells, chimes and drums.
Diwali, the Festival of Lights, can be used as an engaging topic to teach students about diversity, cultural awareness and respect for different traditions.
Cultural Studies & Art:
Explore the significance of Diwali through discussions about light and darkness, good and evil, and community. For EYFS students, you could encourage them to create colourful Rangoli patterns using coloured rice, sand or chalk to help them develop fine motor skills and introduce them to traditional art forms.
You could even organise a “Diwali Celebration Lesson Day” where students can learn in depth about the festival, participate in craft activities and share traditional foods, to enhance cultural appreciation.
Physical Education & Dance
In PE or Dance lessons, you could introduce your students to a simple version of Garba or Dandiya, a traditional folk dance performed during Diwali in India. Encourage students to work in pairs, clapping or tapping sticks together to the beat of music. This is a great way to incorporate dance and cultural learning into PE lessons.
Geography
Since Diwali is celebrated across India, this is a great opportunity to explore the geography of India’s diverse landscapes, from the Himalayas to the Thar Desert. You could set your students a lesson task to create a presentation based on them identifying major cities like Mumbai, Delhi & Kolkata and researching and learning about their Diwali customs.
Bonfire Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Night, is an excellent occasion to delve into the historical context of the Gunpowder Plot, as well as the broader themes of citizenship, democracy and social responsibility.
History & Social Studies:
For older students, this event provides an opportunity to explore the social, political and religious tensions of 17th-century England. Have students engage in lesson debates, examining perspectives on Guy Fawkes’ motives and whether his actions were justified. This aligns well with fostering critical thinking and ethical reasoning.
Younger students can learn about the significance of the event through storytelling, group discussions and creating timelines to strengthen their historical understanding.
Citizenship & PSHE:
Additionally, it’s a perfect opportunity to promote public safety, especially in relation to fireworks. Engaging students in PSHE lessons about personal responsibility, community safety and the legal aspects of firework use helps reinforce important life skills.
You could ask students to create an art project in which they illustrate safety posters about firework safety.
Science
From understanding combustion and energy transfer to the chemistry behind fireworks, Bonfire Night can make science lessons engaging and relatable. You could try explain to younger students the basics of how the fireworks create sound, and demonstrate this by clapping hands or popping balloons and talking about how sound travels through the air.
For secondary school students, you could delve deeper into the forms of energy and energy transfer that occur in fireworks, linking to the conservation of energy principle.
Christmas offers a rich tapestry of cultural, historical and literary traditions that can be explored through a wide array of cross-curricular activities in all lessons.
Literature & Drama:
From reading classic Christmas tales like A Christmas Carol to acting out scenes from Christmas plays, the festive season is a goldmine for developing literacy and performing arts skills. You can encourage students to analyse themes of charity, goodwill and transformation, while younger students may enjoy lessons based on role-playing & puppet shows to develop communication and social skills.
You could host a “Christmas Around the World” lesson project, where students research and present how different cultures celebrate the season. This could even be turned into a geography and research-based learning project, improving both presentation skills and cultural knowledge.
Physical Education
A festive theme can even be incorporated into PE lessons to motivate and encourage exercise over the winter months. You could set up a relay race where students are “reindeer” delivering presents (carrying beanbags) from one side of the hall to the other, adding festive obstacles such as jumping over “chimneys” or dodging “snowballs.”
