Things That Went Bump in the Night — Halloween & Past Simple vs Past Continuous

Bring mystery and storytelling into your classroom with this Pre-Intermediate Halloween ESL lesson for adults. Things That Went Bump in the Night: Halloween & Past Simple vs Past Continuous combines Halloween vocabulary, listening practice, news-based reading and speaking activities to help students describe past events with confidence.

Designed for ESL and EFL teachers, this multi-skill lesson explores the difference between completed actions and actions in progress. Students practise the past simple and past continuous, also known as the simple past and past progressive, through Halloween celebrations, costume descriptions and stories.

This multi-skill resource includes:

• Halloween Vocabulary: Illustrated matching activities introduce eight costume characters, including witches, vampires, ghosts and zombies. Students connect costume objects to characters, practise Halloween verbs and explore descriptive adjectives such as scary, mysterious and terrifying.

• Grammar Explanation & Practice: Clear examples explain how to form positive sentences, negatives and questions in both past tenses. Students practise finished events, background actions, interrupted activities and simultaneous actions through sentence choices, gap fills and error correction. The grammar section also introduces state verbs.

• Listening Practice: In five short Halloween dialogues, speakers describe costumes they wore to a party. Students listen for details, identify each character and record a supporting clue in this “Guess the Costume” listening activity.

• Reading & Storytelling: Two texts adapted from BBC news articles explore Derry’s Halloween celebrations and Somerset’s traditional Punkie Night. Students complete narrative verb gaps, retell their text to a partner and identify information shared across the readings.

• Speaking Activities: Discussion questions explore Halloween customs, myths and celebrations across cultures. Further prompts encourage students to describe past experiences and explain what was happening when an event occurred.

• Teacher Resources: UK and US English lesson versions, A4 student lesson packs, a teacher’s answer key and presentations with animated answers support classroom preparation.

Additional Teaching Resources:

• “The Last Ride Home” Interactive Story: A mysterious retelling of the Vanishing Hitchhiker urban legend develops prediction, pair discussion and narrative grammar. The Google Slides presentation includes illustrated story sections, questions that appear on click and animated grammar answers. An A4 pdf version supports printed pairwork.

• Past Tenses Conversation Cards: Twenty discussion cards provide further past simple and past continuous speaking practice. Available in pdf to use in the classroom and Goggle slides for online classes.

• Homework with Answers: Vocabulary revision and grammar exercises reinforce the lesson. A 60–80-word writing task invites students to describe their last Halloween, a costume party or another celebration. An answer key supports independent checking.

Use this Halloween English lesson to connect grammar practice with memorable stories, purposeful listening and personal conversation.