Halloween Themed Swimming Lessons

Halloween Themed Swimming Lesson Ideas

Have some fun in the pool and get creative with the following spooktacular Halloween swimming lesson ideas!

1. Warm-up Game

Get your swimmers warmed up by embracing the theme and moving around the pool:

  • Walk like a zombie
  • Move like a ghost
  • Be a pumpkin (mushroom float)
  • Fly on a broomstick (use a noodle)
  • Run like a werewolf

2. Haunted House Swimming Game

  • Participants travel around the pool imagining they are travelling around a haunted house avoiding ghosts.
  • Choose a learner to shout ‘ghost’ at random. Everyone has to stand still so the ghost can’t find them.
  • You can adapt for higher stages to swimming and a star float or mushroom float to hide.

3. Halloween Hookey Spooky Swimming Song

A little twist on a nursery rhyme:

In a circle, travel towards the centre and back at times, and stationary in a circle facing the centre at other times, whilst singing:

You put your Zombie arms in, Your Zombie arms out,

In, out, in, out, you shake it all about,

You do the Hookey Spooky and you turn yourself around, that’s what it’s all about,

Woah, the Hookey spooky (x3), Knees bent, arms stretched, Ra-Ra-Ra.

You can substitute the Zoombie Arms for Werewolf Arms and Witches legs.

4. Poltergeist Shuffle Swimming Game

  • Swimmers stand with a floating toy in front of them.
  • With their hands by their sides, they need to undulate their bodies to create waves to move the toy across the pool.
  • The first poltergeist (swimmer) to get their toy to the other side wins.
  • Theme the toys- Eggs become eyeballs, balls become pumpkins and floats become gravestones.

5. Trick or Treat

  • Get everyone to say the rhyme, “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat”
  • Participants float on their backs wiggling their smelly toes, then rotate onto their front and blow bubbles with their faces in, pretending they are apple bobbing,
  • Call “Trick” or “Treat” and get them to alternate between the two.

6. Creepy Cobwebs

Create “cobweb obstacles” under and on top of the water. Learners need to travel through the obstacles under and over the water and past all of the cobwebs.

7. Pumpkin Patch

With the use of floats that represent pumpkins or blow-up pumpkins toys, learners should travel across the station with their pumpkin to place it on the pumpkin patch area.

8 Trick or Treat Cards

The teacher has a bowl of “trick” and “treat” laminated cards. Learners take turns to pick one from the bowl. “Trick” cards are linked to different types of floating. “Treat” cards are different Halloween jumps (jump in like a ghost, witch, spider etc)

9. Skeleton Races

Learners get into pairs and each put a noodle in front under their arms. One learner stands in front of the other then the learner behind holds the ends of the learners noodle in front. When the teacher shouts “swim skeletons”, the learner at the front of the pair can only paddle their arms and the learner at the back c

an only kick their legs. Paris must race to the other end of the station or around a course.

10. Haunted Castle

Split the learners up in two teams. One member of the team sits on the side with the others on the opposite side of the pool in the water.

The teacher sets a time limit for all of the learners to be “rescued” from the haunted castle. The learner on the side swims across the pool with the float and “rescues” a learner and brings them back to the starting point.

The rescues learner travels back across the pool to “rescue” the next learner. The team continues until all of the learners have been rescued from the haunted castle.