🏚️The Hollow Creek Town Council wants a new haunted house, and your students are hired to design it. Over five phases they draw floor plans, manage a budget, write to the council and build a 3D model to present.
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The Haunted House Design Project is a Halloween project-based learning unit for 3rd, 4th and 5th grade that blends math and writing into one real-world task. Students work as architects, accountants, authors and artists to plan, budget, describe and build a haunted house for the fictional town of Hollow Creek.
The project moves through five phases tracked in a student Project Passport. Teams choose a theme, design a name and logo and plan their rooms. Then they draw a floor plan on grid paper, using a mini-lesson, a worked example and practice to calculate area and perimeter.
The budget phase brings in more math: shopping from a 24-item supply catalog, solving store story problems, running a snack shack, tracking ticket sales on a bar graph, scheduling tours with elapsed time and splitting a donation into fractions. Decimals show up naturally in the prices.
Writing is equally strong. Students write a tour guide script, a persuasive letter to the town council, a grand opening listing and a narrative story, with a spooky word bank and planners for support. In the final phase they create a brochure, poster, admission tickets and a 3D fold-up model, then present to classmates.
A 2-week teacher plan with daily lessons and standards, a 5-day express option, differentiation ideas, a 20-point rubric and answer keys make the 44 black and white pages easy to run in whole class, small group, enrichment or homeschool settings.
📖 Teaching guide · 12 min readHalloween Project-Based Learning for 3rd–5th Grade: Teaching Area, Perimeter, Budgets and Persuasive Writing Through DesignRead the guide →Area, perimeter, decimals, graphs and elapsed time all have a purpose when students need them to finish their own design. Team roles keep every student responsible for part of the work, and the persuasive letter gives writing a real audience.
The teacher plan maps it out over two weeks with daily lessons, and a 5-day express option is included for a shorter schedule.
Area and perimeter, decimals, elapsed time, fractions and graphs, along with budget story problems.
Yes. Four role cards for Architect, Accountant, Author and Artist are included for team projects.
A 20-point scoring rubric is included, along with math answer keys, a peer feedback form and a self-reflection page.
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