Tot School- Pumpkins and Halloween

This week in Tot School we continued to learn about pumpkins and included some Halloween themed activities.  Little Guy is 28 months old.

Some of our favorite Halloween books are:

• A Very Brave Witch by Alison McGhee
• Trick or Treat, Marley by John Grogan
• The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat by Stan and Jan Berenstain
• Froggy's Halloween by Jonathan London

I added a couple of activities to his Pumpkin lap book.  I put in new cutting strips and pictures, a shape match, traded the pumpkin sequencing for jack-o-lantern sequencing, and added a pumpkin match game.  This week, I used printables from the pumpkin pack 2 Teaching Mommies, the jack-o-lantern pack at Gift of Curiosity, and pumpkin printables 2 at 1+1+1=1. 

Matching the shapes.

Little Guy loves to cut!

By the end of the week, he could match all 7 pictures on his own!

The biggest jack-o-lantern goes here!

We had a lot of Tot Trays this week (which I did not photograph beforehand, sorry!):

• Coloring pages
• Dot marker pages
• Leaf button snake (same as last week)
• Pumpkin lacing (Using a foam pumpkin shape, I punched holes around the edge and tied on a shoe lace for him to practice lacing.)
• Play dough with his name (see below)
• Pumpkin name puzzle (I drew a large pumpkin on orange construction paper.  I then divided it into 5 parts since there are 5 letters in his name and wrote one letter in each section.  I cut the pieces apart and he had to put his name and the pumpkin back together.  This idea is from How We Learn.)
• Halloween patterning strips (Using a preprinted pattern, Little Guy worked to copy the pattern underneath.  This is from Gift of Curiosity.)
  
• Halloween wooden puzzles
• Halloween counting game (see below)
• Pumpkin and spider web foam stickers (He could put the stickers on paper, a small pumpkin, or a trick-or-treating pail.)

By far, his favorite tray was finding the letters of his name in the play dough.  I made new pumpkin pie play dough for him (it smells so good, recipe below!). Using magnetic letters, I traced them onto a strip of paper beforehand so he could match up the letters as he found them.  Once he found all the letters, he would ask me to put them back in so he could find them again.  I got this idea from School Time Snippets, but modified it to be just his name.

Pulling a letter out!

Here's the recipe for Pumpkin Pie Playdough (from The Griffeth Family)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 tsp. cream of tarter
• 2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
• 1 cup water
• 6 drops red food coloring
• 15 drops yellow food coloring

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients together.  
2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until dough forms in a ball.
3. Remove from heat, put dough onto wax paper to cool.
4. Once cooled, knead.
5. Enjoy!

We also enjoyed playing this Halloween game from Gift of Curiosity.  Instead of using a regular dice, I used this great one that Little Guy got from his aunt and uncle that has clear pockets on all sides to make custom dice!  I put up to three little jack-o-lantern erasers in each one, so we could practice counting 1, 2, and 3.  Once he rolled that number, he would count it, then put that many counters on the game board.

I see two jack-o-lanterns.

And we also were visited by a little frog this week!

I hope you had a fun pumpkin week, too!

We linked up to No Time for Flash Cards Linky Party!  
We also linked up to the Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1!