Fall Puzzles: 60 New Printables for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Everything Between

The stretch from mid-October to Thanksgiving break is packed. There is a Halloween party to plan around, a short week before the long weekend, and a few days where attention runs thin and you need something that still counts as learning.

So we added twenty new fall topics. Each one comes as a crossword, a word search, and a word scramble, for 60 new printable puzzles. Every one is free to print and comes with an answer key.

Halloween and October

Nine topics for the last weeks of October, from kindergarten favorites to a couple that will challenge older students:

• Halloween Monsters (crossword): zombies, mummies, werewolves, and gargoyles, with a note on where each legend began.
• Haunted House (crossword): attics, cobwebs, and creaky staircases. A good warm-up for descriptive writing.
• Pumpkins (crossword): the pumpkin life cycle from seed and sprout to vine, blossom, and jack-o-lantern.
• Bats (crossword): echolocation, roosts, and pollinators. Bat Week runs October 24 to 31.
• Spiders (crossword): arachnids, silk, spinnerets, and molting. Pairs well with Charlotte's Web.
• Trick-or-Treat (crossword): doorbells, buckets, and the safety words that go with walking after dark.
• Day of the Dead (crossword): ofrendas, marigolds, and pan de muerto, for November 1 and 2.
• Spooky Vocabulary (crossword): eerie, ominous, macabre, uncanny. Mood words for middle school writers.
• Edgar Allan Poe (crossword): The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, and the House of Usher, for grades 7 through 12.

Fall Science and the Harvest

Five topics that turn the season into a science or social studies lesson:

• Why Leaves Change Color (crossword): chlorophyll, carotenoids, and anthocyanin. The classroom note includes a simple leaf chromatography experiment.
• Animal Migration (crossword): monarchs, geese, caribou, and salmon, and how they find their way.
• Hibernation (crossword): dens, burrows, torpor, and the wood frog that freezes solid.
• Harvest and the Farm (crossword): tractors, combines, silos, and the crops coming in.
• Fall Festival (crossword): hayrides, corn mazes, caramel apples, and bonfires.

November

Six topics for the month of gratitude, remembrance, and the run-up to Thanksgiving:

• Veterans Day (crossword): November 11, from the World War I armistice to the branches of the military today.
• Diwali (crossword): the festival of lights, with diyas, rangoli, and the story of Rama's return to Ayodhya.
• The Mayflower and Plymouth (crossword): the 1620 voyage, the Mayflower Compact, and the Wampanoag nation, including Massasoit and Tisquantum.
• Thanksgiving Dinner (crossword): gravy, cornbread, pecan pie, and the wishbone.
• Gratitude (crossword): thankful, generous, kindness, and the habit of noticing the good. Good for a class gratitude wall.
• Native American Heritage Month (crossword): sovereignty, powwows, the Code Talkers, and Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary, with Native nations presented as they are today and not only in the past.

These sit alongside the fall puzzles that were already there: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Fall and Autumn, Apples, and Fire Safety.

Word Scrambles Too

Every topic above also has a printable word scramble, built from the same list. Swap /word-search/ for /word-scramble/ in any link, or browse them all on the Word Scrambles page. The scrambles come in Standard and Easy versions, with a word bank you can turn on or off.

Pick the Right One for Your Grade

Each topic page lists a grade level, and they range widely. Pumpkins and Trick-or-Treat are written for kindergarten through third grade, with short, concrete words. Spooky Vocabulary and Edgar Allan Poe are written for middle and high school, with words like apparition and amontillado. Word searches also come in an easy version with fewer words and a hard version with diagonals, so the same topic can work for different students in the same room.

Make It Yours

Every topic page has a button that opens those words in the editor. From there you can add your own vocabulary, change the grid size, or put your class name in the header. If your class is reading a particular Poe story, or your town has its own fall festival, start from ours and make it fit.

And if you want the same fall words as bingo cards, flash cards, or a matching game, save them as a Word List first. Every activity type builds from the list in one click.

Plan the Next Few Weeks Now

If you do one thing this week, open the puzzles you want for Halloween and Thanksgiving week and save them to your dashboard with a free account. They will be waiting, ready to print, when the short weeks arrive.

Pro adds unlimited puzzles, folders to organize by unit or holiday, AI-written clues, CSV upload, and access codes so students can play online.

Is there a fall topic we missed? Tell us. Many of the puzzles we add start as a teacher's request.