If you’re looking to engage your upper elementary students with the best books for Halloween read alouds, you’re in the right place! I have searched all over for fun, a little spooky, and informational picture books that are sure to engage students during this Halloween season. Your students are bound to enjoy many of these Halloween read alouds!
**This blog contains Amazon Affiliate links, which means that Amazon sends me a few pennies if you purchase something through that link at no additional cost to you.**
Bone Soup by Cambria Evans
This book is a Halloween edition of Stone Soup. In this story, three witches are looking for a tasty treat and they find only a small bone in their cupboard. They decide to then go door to door in their village to find just the right ingredients for their Bone Soup. No one in the village believes soup can be made from a bone until the littlest monster reveals just what the special ingredient is. This book can be used to cover skills such as theme, context clues, and tone.
By the Light of the Halloween Moon
This book is a fun, cumulative tale, a little girl’s toe taps a tune as her legs dangle from a footbridge that has all sorts of hidden creatures underneath. There are cats and witches, bats and ghosts. With a rhythmic, bouncy text and imaginative illustrations, this Halloween is sure to entertain your students!
Hallowilloween
This poetry book focuses on different characters associated with Halloween. The poems are funny and rhythmic, written in both first person and third person points of view. This book could cover compare and contrast skills and well as point of view.
The Pomegranate Witch
When a scary old tree blooms with the most beautiful pomegranates ever seen, the neighborhood kids’ mouths water with anticipation. But the tree isn’t theirs – and it has a protector! This book will take students on a fun, rollicking rhyming adventure between the sly kids and their witchy neighbor who may have more than one trick up her sleeve. This book would be great to work on drawing inferences from the text and summarizing.
She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein
This book is a nonfiction text that tells the story of how Mary Shelley came up with the idea of Frankenstein. This story gives insight into the tale behind one of the world’s most famous novels and a popular character for Halloween. This book could cover skills about main idea and supporting details, text structure, refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text explicitly states.
Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich
This book contains 19 different hilarious poems that dive into the secret lives of many well-known Halloween characters such as Bigfoot, Godzilla, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and many others. This book is a little more gruesome than the previously recommended poetry book, but can be great for students that can handle it.
Dia de Los Muertos
This beautifully illustrated book goes through the different traditions that are associated with Dia de Los Muertos, The Day of the Dead. This is a great way to expose students to different cultures. Standards that could be covered in this book include the main idea and key details, accurately quoting text, and context clues.
