Halloween is a great time for some playful, fun math activities like games, puzzles, and more. Puzzles are a great way to add some excitement to math class and when you can turn them into math talks a lot of interesting discussions happen as the students make connections, see the flexibility in math, and share their strategies, ideas, and questions.
Students love to solve puzzles in groups and they love them, even more, when they are in an escape room style. The simplest form of escape room activity with puzzles that we have done is this. Give a puzzle to the team. When they are done they keep it in their box and get the new one. In the end, we all solve the puzzles together, discuss (math talks) and later on see which team made it out successfully. The students are not allowed to correct their cards until after the results. The teams get the same puzzles in the same order. We usually do a few puzzles every day in October. I also encourage them to create their own puzzles and share them with other groups or classes.
Today I am sharing two collections of puzzles one for grades 2/3 and one for grades 3/5-6. (both come with a print and digital version) The puzzles can be used as math talks as well and many of them have more than one answer. They also include templates for the students to create their own puzzles.
The grades 2/3 puzzle collection includes 55 activities
- Decomposing Numbers 1-10 and 1-100
- Addition
- Subtraction
- Multiplication (simple facts)
- ordering
- problem-solving (deductive method)
- matching
- even/odd numbers
- place value
- double/half
- starting with division
- logic
- Arithmetic Puzzles
Sample below
The grades 3/5-6 puzzle collection includes 62 activities
- Decomposing Numbers and 1-100, 1-1000
- Addition
- Subtraction
- Multiplication +facts
- ordering
- problem-solving (deductive method)
- matching
- multiples
- factors
- even/odd numbers
- square numbers
- prime numbers
- place value
- double/half
- division
- divisibility rules
- logic
- Arithmetic Puzzles
- order of operations
- algebra
Sample below
Find the different versions of the puzzle collections below.
Halloween puzzles 2/3 55 print activities
Halloween puzzles 2/3 55 google slides
Halloween puzzles 2/3 bundle print and digital
Halloween puzzles 3/5 62 print activities
Halloween puzzles 3/5 62 google slides
Halloween puzzles 3/5 bundle print and digital
Find many more Halloween activities including free print-to-play games and task cards to practice counting, decomposing/ forming numbers, addition, subtraction, place value, multiplication, division, and integers. Also some Halloween jokes!
