Preschool - Halloween

Day 1: What is Halloween?


We started out our day by reading Halloween.

I think that's the one we read.  I already returned it to the library and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find one book out of the hundreds called "Halloween"!  But regardless of which one it was, I liked the simple text and photographs.  I also had Halloween Is...

and we ended up reading this one too.  They both covered the same information, but one with photos, which are always good, and one with a little more detail.  So you might not need both.  Either one by itself would be fine.

Then we read the books Scary, Scary Halloween and In The Haunted House.

Both Halloween themed without the scary part.

Them we put on the song Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens and did our best scary Halloween dancing.  Alex was a little reluctant at first, but the crazier I got the more comfortable he felt and we had fun in the end.

Then we cut Halloween shapes out of construction paper and decorated them to hang in the window.

Pumpkin and cat by Alex, ghost and bat by me.


Day 2:  Pumpkins


We had a special sick visitor today who couldn't go to school thanks to a nasty sinus infection, so twice the fun!

We started our day with pumpkin toad-in-the-hole!

This was not planned.  We just decided to have this for breakfast and ended up finding a pumpkin cookie cutter in the drawer.  They didn't look anything like pumpkins when they finished cooking, but they were tasty!

We started our official school day with the book Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie.

This was a great book with photos and easy to understand text that talks all about how pumpkins grow and what they're used for.  I was just going to read this book and leave it at that, but the kids saw that I also had From Seed to Pumpkin and insisted I read it too.

The reason I chose the first one is From Seed to Pumpkin had just a bit too much info and the pictures felt too fiction story to me and I wanted the kids to get that what I was reading to them was fact, not story.  But they ended up with a double dose and all was well.

We were going to read Big Pumpkin, but the copy we got from the library had double pages of the second half of the book and no first half!  So we skipped that one and moved on to Pumpkin Soup and The Biggest Pumpkin Ever.

Both fun stories.

Then it was time for pumpkin science!  We made a pumpkin report.  Each kid got a piece of construction paper folded into a book.  We labeled the front and they drew a picture of their pumpkin.  We measured the circumference of a mini pumpkin with a string and glued the string on the inside and labeled it "My pumpkin is this fat."  We measured the height of the pumpkin with a strip of paper and glued that down and labeled it "My pumpkin is this tall."  Then we pulled out the balance and found out our pumpkin weighed 107 pennies and 114 Bananagram tiles.  Alex used the pennies and Ella the letter tiles.

Then we glued that down and labeled it "My pumpkin weighs this much."  And that completed the report.

And then we had to take a pumpkin field trip!  But we're cheap.  We didn't head to a quaint pumpkin patch.  Nope.  We headed off to the grocery store.  But where else can you buy 70 pounds of pumpkin for $5.50?  Alex was very particular about his pumpkin.  He took twice as long to find one as the rest of us.

Because we ran out of time we continued our activities the next day by making pumpkin whoopie pies.  These are dangerous.  If you make them, be warned, you will eat more than one, and possibly more than two, and just maybe you will eat them for breakfast claiming that they are made from pumpkin so they can't be that bad.  Just saying.

There are no longer this many in the container.  There may be significantly less than one. :(


Day 3:  Carving Pumpkins!


I didn't plan anything for this day so we'd have time to carve our pumpkins before daddy had to go to work.  Last year we swore we wouldn't buy four pumpkins to carve until the kids were old enough to carve theirs themselves.  Somehow we forgot about that and got four pumpkins again this year.

So after I had scraped out three pumpkins and helped Ella carve hers, I was pooped.

I had a super cool pumpkin too, and it ended up with the lamest face ever.

But the kids made cute ones.  They designed them themselves.  A washable marker is perfect for letting your kids draw on the face they want, and then once you're done cutting you just wipe off any marker that's left.  Here they are in all their glory:

(Grandma's, Alex's, Mine)

(Cowgirl Ella, Ella's witch, Anton's, skeleton Alex)

Trick-or-Treating was Saturday and was tons of fun.  The kids filled their buckets to the top.  Though it was marred with a trip to the urgent care for what appears to be the second case of pink eye in a week.  Sigh.  Such is life!

 Happy Halloween!