Play School - Halloween

This week the boys and I are talking about Halloween.  The boys (24 months) don't really understand holidays yet but I am doing my best to introduce them this year.  This will be the first year we take them trick or treating so I am pumping up the whole idea of costumes and trick or treating for candy to get them excited about it.

There are so many great Halloween activity ideas out there that we've had plenty of fun things to do this week, and more to come.

Books:

Five Little Pumpkins - author unknown
Max and Ruby Happy Halloween - Nick Jr
J is for Jack O Lantern - Denise Brennan-Nelson
Boo, Bunny - Kathryn O. Galbraith

Alex really enjoyed the books this week.  Throughout the Max and Ruby book Max yells "Boo" which Alex loves and he thinks all the "eek"s and "squeak"s in Boo, Bunny are absolutely hilarious.

Activities:

Felt jack o lanterns- I cut out two large pumpkin shapes from some orange felt and glued them each to a piece of cardboard along with a green stem.  Next I cut out several different shapes of various sizes to use for facial features.  The boys really liked making faces on the pumpkins, especially Aaron.

The first time we played with these I used them as a story-telling prop for Five Little Pumpkins, we made our felt pumpkin faces match each pumpkin in the book as they spoke.  We talked about shapes and relative size.

Slimy Halloween Sensory Bin - to put this together I boiled two boxes of spaghetti and then mixed vegetable oil and green food coloring into the cooked and drained pasta.  Once it all cooled down completely I put it in a bin with some dollar store Halloween decor and trinkets along with some salad tongs.  The boys had a blast.

Unfortunately, though, I made this up Saturday evening and by Tuesday morning we had a bit of a fuzzy science experiment going on in there....yuck.  So I just (thoroughly cleaned and) tossed the plastic spiders and skeletons and such into our bird seed sensory bin.  The boys always LOVE to play with that one.

Cotton ball Ghosts - This idea came from a super cute project Teresa from Capri +3 shared a few weeks back.  I cut out ghost shapes and the letters for the word "Boo" along with some ghostly facial features and glued them to black construction paper ahead of time.

The boys then pulled the cotton balls into fluff, swabbed on some glue with q-tips and stuck their cotton on to the ghosts.  With much concentration....

Alex liked telling me the letters and the sounds they make

 Aaron insisted on putting more glue on by himself

Once they were done with that (and Alex lost interest)  Aaron glued faces on to each of the ghosts and we hung them up to admire them.  I wish I had a picture of Aaron from when I hung them up, he was squealing and pointing at his masterpiece, it was so cute.

Pin the "nose" on the Jack O Lantern - this is something we picked up in the dollar aisle at Target.  The boys like the jolly looking pumpkin hanging on the patio door and we tried some number recognition when putting on his nose.  Or all five of his noses....

It's been a fun week so far and I am really looking forward to taking the kids to a Halloween event at the Springs Preserve on Friday.  On a side note, if you ever visit Vegas with kids (or just want to see something other than the Strip) this is a great place to go.

I'm also looking forward to having the boys help me decorate some festive Halloween cookies and paint some pumpkins next week.  I hope you all are having lots of Fall fun too!

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