Halloween Activities

Our week was basically split into two parts. We finished up our Halloween activities the first half of the week, and then we did a lot of Letter I activities the second half of the week. I will share more about the Letter I in another post.

Felt Pumpkin Play

All of the kids enjoyed playing with the felt pumpkin faces. It was a very easy and inexpensive activity to put together, and I loved seeing how each of the kids interacted with the pieces differently.

First I let the big kids try them out in our main workspace. They started by making different faces. Soon they were giving their pumpkins names and describing the little stories about their pumpkins. What great inspiration for oral vocabulary practice!

Then I taped the pumpkins to our kitchen cabinets. Tinker’s favorite place to play is right at my feet, and I enjoy being able to watch her and interact with her when I have to be doing other things. She liked putting all of the pieces she could fit onto each pumpkin. Then she would take them all down one by one and start over. This was a great help when I was trying to cook dinner!

Phonemic Awareness Activities

We continued to practice the concept of word this week. We used acorns last week, but this time we used a variety of small items: pumpkin erasers, ghost erasers, and pumpkin seeds. Here Lovey is practicing pulling down a pumpkin for each word in the sentence: I say trick or treat! We only do two or three sentences a day, but the kids are getting really good at identifying the individual words in each sentence.

More Halloween Sensory Play

Our Halloween sensory bin was well used all week long. Lovey liked to take out ALL of the pieces (except the black beans) and then sort and count them. Great math practice!

Big Buddy loved stacking the pumpkin erasers, and he got really good at concentrating long enough to stack quite a few of them!

A while ago we made flubber, so I thought Halloween was a great time to pull it out again. I followed this recipe, and it really turned out great even though I didn’t have quite as much glue as the original recipe suggested. We made it in early September, and it is still holding up well.

This week we used some of our cookie cutters to make impressions in the flubber. The kids really liked seeing the pumpkin shapes and Letter I on the surface.

Our pumpkin pie playdough from Fall week also continued to be a favorite.

Halloween Science Activities

Don’t you love when little things turn out to be BIG fun? I happened to grab some growing capsules from the dollar bins at Target one day, and on Halloween we decided to try them out. If you haven’t seen them before they are basically tiny sponges in different shapes that are squished inside a tiny capsule. The capsules melt when you put them into warm water, and the sponge “grows” and reveals its shape.

I didn’t tell the kids any of this before doing our “experiment”. I simply put the capsules and a large bowl of water in front of them. They stared at them for a bit. Lovey asked if they were vitamins and warned her buddy not to touch them just in case! Then we looked at them more closely. We described them by color and discussed how they felt when we held them. Then we decided to put them in water to see if they would change in any way.

See this reaction?

They were so excited to see the capsules change into these tiny little sponge creatures (bats, owls, spiders, and pumpkins). We had a lot of fun watching all of them change. Then we talked a little about the word “dissolve,” and I explained a little about what happened when the water touched the capsules. They also had fun playing with the sponges once they were dry.

We also cut open one of our pumpkins to explore the inside. The kids enthusiastically counted as I made individual cuts in the top of the pumpkin to get it open. I forgot to prep it earlier that day, but this worked out well anyway. Then they took turns using their senses to explore the inside of the pumpkin.

Tinker was NOT a fan of this science project! Eew, Mommy!

Outdoor Activities

The kids were trying to pick up all of the pumpkins and then roll them around in the house, so I decided that would be a great physical activity to wear them all out before nap time.

After carrying all the pumpkins outside, we counted how many pumpkins we had in all. Then the kids helped each other line them up from smallest to largest. I loved watching them as they thought about which pumpkin would go next. The babies even joined in (mostly to take the pumpkins out of the line, but the big kids were very patient with them).

All the while they were begging to roll the pumpkins, so that’s what we did next. They spent a good amount of time rolling the pumpkins all over the yard. Even Tinker tried it out.

He rolled this pumpkin back and forth quite a few times, even up and down the hill! Then they all went to sleep with little trick-or-treating dreams in their heads!

We also did these Halloween activities that I shared with everyone earlier. Check them out if you missed anything.

• Halloween Songs and Activities for Calendar Time
• Halloween Sensory Activities
• Spider Headband
• Bat Craft

What were your kids’ favorite Halloween activities this year?