Gravestone Guessing Game

This may be a little late for this year, but I’ve discovered an easy and fun way to link Halloween with reading! The Gravestone Guessing Game!

First, you pick some book villains that have died in their stories. For the game I ran this year, I had seven including The White Witch (The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe), Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and Captain Hook (Peter Pan).

You create a gravestone for each villain. They can be cut from cardboard or foam board, and painted to look like stone. I also included black “Etching” pictures on the stone to clue folks into who’s stone it belonged to (For example, Captain Hook’s stone had a Skull and Crossbones above the inscription.)

Each stone also got an inscription on it, a poem describing the character and how they died. For example, on Hook’s stone it read:

“I brought fear as I sailed the sea
No man was so fierce as me
I feared only a Croc
And the tick of a clock
Till I was that beasts snack at tea!”

However no stone had the characters name on it. Each stone however, got a letter glued to it on orange paper. The stones were then displayed around the children’s room.

Each child playing the game got a sheet with the name of the seven villains (and the book they belonged to). The children then went around the room and read each of the tombstones, trying to figure out what villain belonged to what stone. They wrote the letter of the stone beside the name on the sheet.

It was a big hit at our Halloween Haunt. We’ve decided to keep the stones up till after Halloween, as it’s an activity that the kids can do independently.