Halloween Activities

It’s starting to look like Fall around here even though Florida’s weather still is in the high 80s with absolutely no forecast of cooler weather. Even though it is blazing hot with humidity outside, our classroom is feeling more fall! Take a look at all the fun art activities and independent activities we have put together for the month of October. To start things off, we had a creative art lesson plan for Jack-O-Lanterns. We handed out pre-cut orange pumpkins. Then each child cut different shapes from black tissue paper to make two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. After cutting the black tissue paper, they used glue bottles to glue their face to the orange pumpkin. The final step was to add teeth. Every student cut out teeth (we encouraged them to try to cut triangles) and whole punched white circles for the eyes.

This activity encouraged the student to build fine motor skills by using glue bottles, scissors, and hole punches.  Our next art activity was to stamp different shapes to make orange pumpkins on a vine. We had previously read The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin by: Joe Troiano. We pre-mixed different shades of orange and found foam shapes to use as stamps. We let the children stamp as many pumpkins on their vine as they could, varying in shapes and shades. For another enhancement activity check out our Spookley the Square Pumpkin Matching Game at TPT.For small groups, we came up with a few games that could be played at the table. Our first half of the year, we really try to focus on building fine motor skills so we needed an activity to express this as well as something creative for the kids to do individually. We set up four table trays. Each tray was equipped with play dough ( we used four colors for Halloween…black, green, orange, and purple), Halloween and shape cookie cutters, a rolling pin and Mr. Potato head parts. We included the shape cookie cutters to build shape recognition and reinforcement and the Mr. Potato head parts for fine motor to allow them to create their own silly monsters. Our second small group activity was a sensory bin with colored rice. We dyed the rice orange for Halloween (you can also use this for fall/Thanksgiving) We placed colored pom-poms and matching colored Halloween cups (found in the Target dollar section) to allow a sorting game. As we moved into our math/science stations, the kids were more excited to be hands on. We also extended the fine motor skills as well as the Halloween theme throughout our learning centers. For math, we included numbered clothespins and a small pinwheels with fall pictures on it for counting practiced. This activity allowed for number recognition, number matching and counting. In our science center, we experimented with our light table. A parent (who happened to be a veterinarian) brought in animal skeletons for use to view and look at. The kids had a blast trying to guess which animal each x-ray was and loved seeing all the different sized bones. For our outside activity, we took mini chalkboards outside to increase the understanding of x-rays. Each student created their own spooky x-ray picture. After completing our drawings outside, we headed inside to read Skeleton Hiccups by: Margery Culer. For our Halloween party, we took photos of all the kids in our DIY Photo Booth. WE simply put up an orange table cloth on our classroom door. I hung some black foam bats and a garland of orange pumpkins. Everyone got to pick their own photo booth props for some silly photos.

Our last game of the month was a pumpkin shape matching game. We included two-dimensional and three-dimensional shaped pumpkins. The kids really loved this game because of all the different pumpkin faces, but it really worked on shape recognition and was a great introductory tool for 3-D shapes.