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Halloween 2022 Secret Messages

Happy October! For many, October is the month of Halloween math worksheets! Math-Drills includes many options for holiday themed math worksheets, and Halloween is no exception.

A new type of Halloween math worksheet has appeared for 2022 which might seem familiar because it was also added for Saint Patrick’s Day and Easter earlier this year; however, there are new multiplication versions as well as the addition versions. Halloween Secret Message math worksheets involve solving a number of math questions to decipher a message. The answers to the math questions complete a decoder which is then used to solve the secret message.

For example, the math question for the letter A on the three-digit addition version is 670 + 574. Students calculate the answer to be 1244. Wherever they see 1244 in the secret message, they write/input an A. They do this for all the letters and special characters in the decoder and eventually figure out the secret message.

There are five different secret messages for Halloween: addends 1 to 25, two-digit addition, three-digit addition, single-digit multiplication, and two-digit by one-digit multiplication. The secret messages include three snippets from famous poets (Shakespeare, Poe, Howitt), a joke/pun and a traditional quote. The text hopefully isn’t too predictable, so it will force students to complete more of the decoder questions to figure out the message. An obvious extension to this activity is to look at more of the text from which the quotes are drawn (Macbeth, The Raven, The Spider and the Fly, respectively), find more Halloween puns or study other quotes related to October and Halloween.

All five of the secret message worksheets have a student version which is fillable and savable which means they can be completed on the computer without printing, but they work equally as well as printed worksheets (the fillable boxes that you see in the PDF don’t print).

If you’re looking for something else related to Halloween, check out the Halloween Math Worksheets page at Math-Drills and discover many other math activities.