We devoted two weeks to our Halloween activities! Sweet E and I had so much fun. Each day we began by talking about the calendar and the weather of course. Then we did activities here and there. We also watched a few Halloween songs from "Super Simple" on YouTube throughout the week.
Books
We have a ton of Halloween books, plus a few we borrowed from the library. But these have been our favorites, especially Room on the Broom and Big Pumpkin!
Spider Web Fine Motor
I weaved some yarn through a basket, and dropped some pom poms inside. Sweet E needed to use the tongs to try to remove the pom poms, then sort them onto the matching paper.
This was a challenge, but she did great!
Then she wanted to count them all up!
Stickers + Alphabet Review
We reviewed a few lowercase letters by placing particular stickers onto each one.
Free Painting
Sweet E loves free painting, so I pulled this out one afternoon. I poured out just a few Halloween-type colors for her, and played Halloween music in the background!
A masterpiece!
Learning Lowercase l
For our next lowercase letter I gave Sweet E some magnetic spiders (which we made for Honey Pot's Harry Potter birthday party), and she placed them in each circle. Printable comes from Easy Peasy Learners.
Monster Math
I created this years ago for Honey Pot, initially inspired by No Time for Flashcards.
First I wrote numbers on each monster, and Sweet E needed to place that many eyes onto it.
Then she erased them and wanted to write her own numbers! I was very impressed to see how well she wrote these!
She even did it another time!
She loved these so much we briefly took it one step further, and worked on some beginner addition.
Bat Craft
I saw this idea from Books and Giggles and just thought it was super cute. First I taped a cutout of a bat onto black paper. Then I drew a moon around it, and invited Sweet E to color in the circle with chalk.
Then we used our hands to smear the chalk up a bit, to give it a hazy look.
Finally, we removed the bat cutout, and glued on eyes. Love it!
Monster Letters - Alphabet Review
For this activity I used some fun-tac to temporarily place some googly eyes on the letters. Then Sweet E needed to match the lowercase letter monster to the uppercase one.
Of course she made them talk to one another!
Ghost Letters
This was the favorite activity of the week! I first saw the idea at Teachers Pay Teachers and had to give it a try. First I borrowed a UV Pen from Honey Pot (she and Little M&M are always getting these invisible ink pens at the school book fair). Then I wrote the letters we'd learned so far onto each ghost using the special pen. When it's written on it, it looks like nothing is there:
Then when you shine the UV light on it (located right on the back of the special pen) it looks like this:
So I stuck the ghosts all over the house, and Sweet E went on a ghost hunt! I snuck in some lowercase review by having her check off the lowercase letter when she found each uppercase letter.
Looks like there is no letter there, but shine your light on it and:
There it is!
Sweet E and I completed the entire checklist, then re-hid the ghosts and played again four times in a row. Four times!!
Such a fun game!
Playdoh
We had to pull out the playdoh this week, along with some Halloween cookie cutters.
And we made them talk to one another, as we always do.
We made all the characters food to eat too!
We also practiced our next lowercase letter by building it with playdoh. Printable mat came from The Kindergarten Connection.
And we made a spider on this printable playdoh mat from Learn Create Love.
Mummy Craft
Just a gluing craft, using paper towels to "wrap" the mummy!
Then we glued on two eyes.
Number Toss
I covered up our miniature cornhole game, and turned it into a ghost. Then I labeled a few orange balls with the numbers 1-20, using a dry erase marker. She needed to pick up a ball, say the number, and toss it into the ghost's mouth.
She loved this, and of course asked me to make the ghost talk, which made it more fun!
Learning Letter n
Another printable from Easy Peasy Learners. I had pom poms out for Sweet E to use, but she chose to fill in the Ns with dot markers instead. Fine by me!
Ghost Matching
We had some ghost stickers, so I made up a quick matching game for Sweet E.
Stickers + Alphabet Review
Using more of our Halloween stickers, I created another alphabet review like we had done the previous week. It's a great, quick activity for when Sweet E wants to "do school" and I don't have much planned!
Making Witch Potions
We have done this activity so many times! It's the classic volcano experiment, which we even did in these little cauldrons once before, for Honey Pot's Harry Potter Party! Inside each cauldron was a few drops of liquid watercolors, and a spoonful or two of baking soda.
Here's our little witch, ready to make some potions!
She used the dropper to add some "ingredients" to the pot, vinegar.
And loved watching them bubble over!
She would always tell me what color it was.
And she kept going until each pot had bubbled over.
So colorful!
She kept going for as long as they'd keep bubbling!
Then once she couldn't get them to react quite so much, she started pulling the vinegar from the cauldrons, and putting them into the vinegar cup. She loved experimenting with it!
Then everything turned dark green as she continued to mix and pour.
Until finally it was all black, and very few bubbles popped up.
Sticky Paper Ghost
I remember doing this activity with Honey Pot and Little M&M a few years ago, and they enjoyed it. I just cut out the middle of the ghost, and put a piece of contact paper sticky-side-up behind it.
Then Sweet E added some cotton balls to fill it up!
So cute, and so soft!
Haunted House - Beginning Sounds
I found a cute haunted house template on the internet, and wrote a letter on each window and door, plus a couple more nearby it. After Sweet E colored in the house, she needed to put the stickers where they go.
What is that sticker? A skeleton? What letter does s-s-skeleton start with? S, good job!
She did so good with this, and put them all in the right place! Here it is with the windows closed:
And open!
Shape Sorting
We used the cauldrons to sort shapes one morning. The printable shapes came from tot-schooling, and I just printed them scaled down to fit in our cauldrons.
Bat Roll and Cover Game
This printable came from Gift of Curiosity! It had the numbers 1-6 repeated twice, so I whited-out half of them, and re-wrote them to go from 1-12. This meant we had to start with the 1 covered, but after that we could play with two dice!
It was a fun, quick game. And a little bit of counting practice is good any day!
Spaghetti Sensory Bin + Cutting Practice
I saw this idea floating around on Pinterest. We had done a rainbow spaghetti bin before, and Sweet E loved it! But we had never used scissors with noodles before! So I used just three Halloween-type colors, dropped in some cauldrons and spiders, and provided a couple pairs of scissors.
Sweet E dug right in with her little scissors!
Cutting noodles was a new experience for her, and she did so much of it!
Finally she reached her hands in to mix up the noodles!
Oooo!
A little messy, but a lot of fun!
Back to cutting. I love her squinty happy face. It's so very her!
And of course, every sensory bin winds up this way!
Squishy!
She loved dancing and sliding around in there!
Aaand back to cutting, very intensely, lol!
This is so cool, mom!
All in all, a successful two weeks of festivities!
