Roundup: Halloween and other October Activities for Kids

It's that time of year again when we have so many holidays coming upon us! This month, we are celebrating the beginning of fall, Columbus Day, and of course Halloween! Around our house we are starting our celebrations early because baby #4 is coming at the end of this month so we will definitely be scaling back our activities then. Still, we are looking forward to celebrating as much as we can in the next couple of weeks.

Below is a round-up of a few October activities we have previously shared with you. We hope you have fun celebrating with your family, friends, and schools!

Halloween Party/Activity Ideas
Minute to Win It Halloween Party Games
13 Spooky Halloween Crafts, Games and Activities
Halloween Service Project
Halloween Monster Lab
Halloween Spider and Pumpkin Craft

Halloween Treats and Snacks
9 Halloween-themed Snacks and Treats
Homemade Doughnuts
Spooky Popcorn Gloves
Pumpkin StewApple Crisp and Homemade Icecream

Halloween Costume Ideas
DIY Halloween Costume: Refrigerator
8 Creative Halloween Costumes
Halloween Costume/Pregnancy Announcement: There's a Bun in the Oven
DIY Crayon Costume 
Spider Hairstyle

October Lesson Plans
A is for Apple Preschool Activities
F is for Fall Preschool Activities
Columbus Day Activities
X is for X-Ray (fun to go along with Halloween because of skeletons)
E is for Egypt (could go along with Halloween because of mummies)
Halloween Picture Books 
Easy Halloween Math Manipulatives

Field Trips
Also, don't forget to check out your local community for fun seasonal activities--harvest festivals, pumpkin patches, trick-or-treat parties, and more. I love how many low-cost, family-friendly activities there are this time of year.

For more ideas, you can also check out my Pinterest Boards with ideas I have collected around the web:
A is for Apple
P is for Pumpkin
F is for Fall
Columbus Day
Halloween

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10 Favorite Halloween Picture Books

One activity I love to do at Halloween class parties is have a story corner for one of the stations.  Sometimes I have had the story corner combined with a snack or refreshment, so while they are eating, they are still engaged and calm.  There are so many fun Halloween books and some of them are quite interactive as well.  So here I share some of my favorites.  Please comment below and share some of your favorites back!

Halloween Bugs

by David Carter

I love David Carter's creative and silly popup books with colorful and unique bugs!

 

Click, Clack, Boo!: A Tricky Treat

by Doreen Cronin

By the author of the famous, Click, Clack, Moo!  This is a fun Halloween spin on the book kids love so much.

Five Little Pumpkins

by Dan Yaccarino

Most children and parents have heard the poem, Five Little Pumpkins.  Here's a fun way to let the kids enjoy the poem to pictures.  And here is a link to a fun game you can play in conjunction with the book.

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything

by Linda Williams

A delightful book about a lady walking through the woods at night.  What makes this especially fun for youngsters is the repetitive chants throughout the book that they can learn and repeat with you as you go.  A perfect book for a story corner at a Halloween Party! I even found a fun game that goes along with this book with free printables! An another site with arts on crafts to go along.  I must not be the only one who loves this book!

10 Trick-or-Treaters

by Janet Schulman

A colorful and fun book that teaches children numbers and counting at the same time as the Trick or Treaters disappear one by one.

Inside a House That is Haunted

by Alyssa Capucilli

A great interactive book with lots of repetition as one by one spooky things are added.  Similar to "This is the House that Jack Built" format.  Young children do very well with repetitive books like this that keep them engaged and allow them to interact.

Go Away, Big Green Monster!

by Ed Emberley

A cute book that not only teaches kids not to worry about those nighttime monsters, but also reviews colors in a bright and fun way.  So many cute crafts go along with this, including these cute handprint monsters and paper plate monsters and other activities!

Room on the Broom

by Julia Donaldson

A fun Halloween story about a witch who has to decide if there is room on her broom for unexpected guests.

Humbug Witch

by Lorna Balian

A Halloween story with a twist at the end.  A witch just can't get her magic to work until at the end you discover she is actually a little girl dressing up!

By the Light of the Halloween Moon

by Caroline Stutson

A book I found recently that builds upon itself as spooky things happen by the light of the Halloween Moon.  A great one for young learners and interaction.

See our other Halloween Party, Craft, and Treat Ideas!

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Back to School Picture Books, Songs, Snack, and Craft

I can't believe summer is already over. We started our first "official" week of homeschooling our kindergartner two weeks ago, and I've been doing some preschool activities with my 4 and 2 1/2 year-old children as well. At these ages, books are the heart of all our learning.

Whether your children are heading off to preschool or kindergarten, or you are doing your own school at home, here are a few fun "back to school" books and activities you might enjoy.

Back to School Books

My Friends Taro Gomi

I read this book with the children in our preschool co-op last year, and we talked about how just as the little girl learned something different from each of her animal friends, one of the fun things about school is that we can make new friends and learn from each other.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Because we did a letter of the week theme for our pre-school, we introduced the year with the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I found a palm tree decoration at the dollar store that we used as our own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree in our house, adding colorful construction paper letters each time we learned them.

If You Take a Mouse to School by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond

My children love Laura Numeroff's books, and this back to school book featuring mouse is charming.

Back to School for Rotten Ralph  by Jack Gantos and Nicole Rubel

My kids love how mischievous Rotten Ralph is...

Seven Little Mice Go To School by Kazuo Iwamura

My oldest son loves snakes/the woods, so this non-conventional back-to-school book featuring mice who outwit a snake was a hit for him.

Back to School Songs

To go along with our back to school books, we also sang some fun songs. These are all classic children's songs that can be found on various kids' songs anthologies if you are unfamiliar with the tunes:

"The ABC Song" (to go with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom)


"Make New Friends" (a fun round to go with My Friends)

Make new friends,
but keep the old.
One is silver,
the other is gold.

"The More We Get Together" (a fun get to know you or opening song)

The more we get together
Together, together
The more we get together
The happier we'll be
Cause your friends are my friends
And my friends are your friends
The more we get together
The happier we'll be

Optional bridge to "The More We Get Together":
There's _(child's name)_______ and _____________ and ______________ and ______________,
The more we get together the happier we'll be.

Back to School Snack

A fun back-to-school snack (and other Chicka Chicka Boom Boom activities), can be found at Mrs. Martell's Class. The children made Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees with sliced apples as the leaves, a chocolate wafer trunk, cocoa puff coconuts, and skittles in place of the colorful alphabet letters.

Or if you want another fun treat, you can try making these cute apple cupcakes that we shared earlier with you.

Back to School Craft

For a simple back to school craft, I printed out each child's name extra large on a full-sized sheet of paper. The children traced and decorated their names and then I provided them with stickers, scrap paper, and other craft supplies to decorate with and glue on in an open-ended collage.

Also, don't forget to check out all of our A to Z Preschool themes that you can do on your own at home or as part of a preschool co-op. Happy Learning!

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B is for Butterfly Preschool Unit

We have had an amazing time studying butterflies this last month. It has been a perfect at-home preschool unit for my children ages 2, 3, and 5.

Learning Letters and Numbers

If you are working on your ABC's a great resource for the B is for Butterfly unit are these free B is for Butterfly printables from Confessions of a Homeschooler. These include tracing, counting, and other butterfly-themed activities

Books to Read

Below are a few books we read as we studied butterflies!

National Geographic Readers: Caterpillar to Butterfly
This is a good non-fiction easy reader about butterflies. It is short enough for young kids to listen to or read on their own but still full of interesting facts.

Caterpillar Spring, Butterfly Summer
This fun pop-up book is great for the youngest kids. My two-year-old loved it, but even my five-year-old thought it was a fun book.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar
This is a classic that my kids love. However, if you are being scientifically accurate, you should note that butterflies do not form cocoons--the correct term for a butterfly is a chyrsalis. I had to make this correction with my kids but it led to a good discussion about the differences between cocoons and chyrsalises as well as the differences between butterflies and moths (which do form cocoons).

Butterfly Garden (Robin Hill School)
This was an easy reader that my oldest son could read independently. Yet it was also enjoyable for all of my children because it described a process of growing butterflies in a classroom, very similar to what we did in our own home.

Butterfly Tree
This showed the wonder of a little girl who saw a group of migrating Monarch butterflies. It was very poetic with beautiful illustrations.

Hands-on Activity

We grew our own butterflies. This was an amazing experience. All of my children loved checking on our caterpillars every day and watching them grow. They were so excited and filled with wonder, seeing the things that they had read about in our books happen in front of their eyes. As a mom, I was just as excited to watch the changes.  You can buy your own Insect Lore Butterfly Garden to grow butterflies at home. (Note: The kit comes with an empty butterfly pavilion and a certificate for you to mail in to receive 5 live caterpillars. There is an additional $5 shipping charge when you redeem your certificate for the caterpillars. The experience of growing your own butterflies is well worth it!)

At the end, we had a party with friends to celebrate butterflies and release them. The butterflies were docile enough for my older kids to hold on their fingers. I used a q-tip dipped in sugar water to help my two-year-old pick up a butterfly before releasing it.

Pretend Play

It is fun to act out the stages of a butterfly's life. Pretend to be a caterpillar and wiggle around on the floor. Curl up into a pretend chrysalis and then emerge as a butterfly and pretend to fly around. You can make your own butterfly wings if you want to add to the fun. You could even pretend to with your proboscis (a regular drinking straw would be a perfect proboscis), just as we did in our B is for Bee unit last year.

Snacks

When our butterflies were ready to release, we invited a few friends over to help us release them. I made butterfly shaped sugar cookies (my favorite sugar cookie recipe is here), and the kids each decorated their own cookie.

For a slightly healthier butterfly-themed snack, we also had colored goldfish in plastic baggies that were clipped together in the middle. You could also do this with colored cereal or fruit.

I also love this edible butterfly life cycle.

Crafts

Probably the most common butterfly craft you might have seen is the tissue paper butterfly. We have done several variations of this butterfly craft. For a basic butterfly, use tissue paper as the wings, and then cinch up the center and create a butterfly body with a chenille stem.

For my daughter's butterfly above, we left a small loop at the bottom of the butterfly's body so she could wear it like a ring. My sons decorated coffee filters instead of tissue paper and then cinched them up.

You could also use a clothespin instead of a chenille steam to hold the butterfly's body together.

Another fun craft and pretend play prop is butterfly wings. You can use regular cardstock, butcher paper, or even old file folders.

Above is my son with his butterfly wings made from an old file folder that he created at a class at our local nature center. As part of this craft, the teacher also talked about symmetry and encouraged all of the kids to make their designs symmetrical.

Song

My kids enjoyed dancing around to this song based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Note that it does relate the incorrect term "cocoon" instead of "chrysalis" just as the book does, but it is still a lot of fun.

The kids sang to this song at our local library and the librarian prepared foam butterflies on sticks for each of the kids to wave around as they listened to the song.

Field Trips

It just so happened that when we were studying butterflies, there were several free and fun community programs that went along with our theme. We went to a butterfly program at our local library and a class about butterflies at our local nature center.

We also went to the Butterfly Pavilion at the Natural History Museum near us. There were many amazingly beautiful butterflies to see up close!

Our study of butterflies was definitely one of our favorite units we have done. For more of our A to Z lesson plans, you can visit our Lesson Plans page here!

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Easy May Day Craft for Kids

Tomorrow is May Day--not a major holiday in the U.S., but one that you can still have a little fun with. In honor of May Day this year, I read a simple picture book and then created recycled flowers with my preschool age children:

We read the book On the Morn of Mayfest by Erica Silverman. This book starts with a young girl who is walking in her sleep. One by one animals and people get caught up following each other and before you know it there is a spontaneous May Day Parade. This is a silly and fun book that my children enjoyed.

For a craft we made recycled egg carton flowers. We got the inspiration for this craft here, though our flowers are much simpler kids' version of the original craft. This would also make a fun Earth Day or Mother's Day craft.

To make these flowers I first cut an old egg carton into individual sections. My kids painted or drew on the sections of egg carton with paint or crayons. When the paint dried, we cut slits in egg carton sections in different ways to make petals. Cutting through the egg carton was tough--so I did the cutting part for my younger children, though my 5-year-old cut his flowers out himself. We finished off by adding flower stems made from chenille stems with beads or buttons as the centers. I poked a small hole in the center of each flower and threaded the stems and beads/buttons onto each flower. My children chose the beads or buttons that they wanted to be the centers of their flowers. Each flower turned out different and fun!

Tomorrow, we also are going to celebrate by heading to one of the many botanic gardens in our area to enjoy looking at some beautiful spring flowers.

Another fun May Day tradition you could do with your children is anonymously leave baskets of fresh flowers or treats on the doorsteps of friends and neighbors. For more fun May Day activities, see my May Day Pinterest board and be sure to also check out the adorable May Day birthday party my sister shared last year!

Don't forget to enter our giveaway before May 10 for a free family pass to the Princess Festival! 11 easy ways to enter!

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Lesson Plan: Introduction to Archaeology for Kids

We have a membership to the Discovery Science Center here in southern California which recently had an exhibit about Indiana Jones and the science of archaeology. Our visit to that exhibit made my five-year-old excited about archaeology, so we decided to do our own study of archaeology at home.

Introduction

As a starting point, we read up some more about what archaeology really is all about. We loved the picture book Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Kate Duke--This book might be a bit long for young kids but if your kids are interested in the topic, they will find this a fun and informative introduction to archaeology. Also, while it is written in a way that kids can enjoy and understand, I still learned new things as an adult. We also read introductory pages about archaeology from a history encyclopedia.

Activity
After reading about archaeology, we went on on archaeological dig in our backyard. First, we set up a grid with stakes and caution tape in our sandbox (I had leftover caution tape from our construction-themed birthday party, and we had a lot of wooden stakes sitting around from my husband's work on our yard). We created a very simple grid with just four cells. Then my kids dug in the sandbox and we made notes of what we found in each cell. (I didn't prepare ahead of time by burying things because I just let my kids dig up toys that they had previously buried by themselves just in their day-to-day play). If you don't have a sandbox, you could also bury a few objects in a patch of plain dirt that you don't mind having disturbed. If you were to set up the dig in advance, you might even have layers of items with the "oldest" items being at the bottom. Here is an image of my son's findings in our archaeological dig.

He didn't draw items to scale or make any notes other than drawing pictures of what he found and which area he found them in. But I thought that if I did this again I would have him go further and measure the sizes of each item to incorporate some math into the activity.

My son then had the idea to create his own "radiocarbon dating" machine (we had read about these machines in our books about archaeology), so he set up some chairs and tinker toys and pretended to study the "artifacts" in his machine.

Snack
We didn't have a special snack when we studied archaeology, but our Dinosaur Lesson Plan had a fun edible snack while doing an "paleontology dig" and I think this lesson plan that involves a simulated archaeological dig with a 3 layer cake sounds so cool! They would be fun ways to incorporate a snack and a lesson in one!

Game
We had fun playing this online "Tools of the Trade" game from the American Museum of Natural History website. There are more fun activities to check out on that website as well.

Field Trip
As I said--it was our field trip to the science museum that first sparked our interest in archaeology. But we finished up by going to the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum in Los Angeles--which is a working excavation site right in the middle of our big city--though technically this fits within paleontology, not archaeology as they have excavated prehistoric animals there--nothing human. Still the way the pit was set up in grids and the way the "fishbowl" lab was set up was exactly as we had read about in our archaeology book, so my kids loved seeing that!

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Don't forget to enter our giveaway before May 10 for a free family pass to the Princess Festival! 11 easy ways to enter! 

 

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C is for Cloud Lesson Plan

Below are some "C is for Cloud" themed activities I did with my two boys, ages 5 and 3! Happy Learning!

Books

Below are two picture books to read and enjoy as you study clouds:

• It Looked Like Spilt Milkby Charles G. Shaw is a book that embraces the delight of looking at the clouds and imagining all the different things that the clouds look like. 
•  Shapes in the Sky: A Book About Clouds  by Josepha Sherman is a good nonfiction book about clouds that gives factual information in an easy to understand way. It was short and simple enough for my preschoolers to listen to while at the same time it reviewed the definition of clouds and what the different types of clouds are.

Learning the Letter

For a sensory and language activity in one, practice writing the letter C or short words that include the letter c in shaving cream "clouds" that you squirt on a cookie sheet. My younger child loved this. Or, if your kids are a bit more squeamish about touching the shaving cream (as my older son is), you could put the shaving cream in a plastic bag and let them draw the letters and words that way.

Math Activity

Play a counting game with a felt cloud, umbrellas,and raindrops. I had made this game previously for our U is for Umbrella unit we had done another year and we pulled it out again when we studied clouds. I gave each child an umbrella and put a white felt cloud with raindrops on it in the center. I clapped my hands (like thunder) and they listened to see how many times I clapped. They chose the corresponding number of raindrops from the cloud and put them on their umbrellas. We repeated several times and then they each took turns doing the thunder while I played along.

Science: Cloud Study
Learn what clouds are and learn about the three main types of clouds: cumulus, stratus, and cirrus. (You can go into more depth than this with older kids, but with preschoolers, we just kept it simple with those three). While learning, you could try a couple very simple hands-on activities that we did.

• We talked about how clouds are formed from moisture in the air. I had my children blow onto a glass window to see the clouds that their breath made.
• We used straws to blow cotton balls around, just as the wind blows clouds through the sky. You can also use these same cotton balls to model different types of clouds. A regular cotton ball can represent a cumulus cloud. Stretch it out and flatten it to become a stratus cloud. Make it even thinner--as wispy as you can--to make a cirrus cloud.
• We demonstrated how rain comes from clouds. First, we filled a sponge "cloud" with water and showed how when the sponge got full it could no longer hold all the water, so it needed to "rain." We also demonstrated rain using a shaving cream "cloud" floating on water and food coloring as the rain as in this demonstration here.

Craft

For a craft, give the children blue construction paper. Have them create clouds by using sponges and paints to paint on white, grey, and pink clouds. Or you could have the kids glue on cotton ball clouds. You could add a cute little rhyme below as in this lesson, or you could just have the kids draw whatever scene they want below the clouds. My oldest always has to incorporate trains or cowboys into his projects, so he drew a Western scene underneath his clouds--but sadly I forgot to get a picture of his artwork. Below is my 3-year-old with his sponge painting--very simple but fun nonetheless!

Snack Time

Make blue Jell-O in clear plastic cups. Squirt whipped cream "clouds" on top.

If you are connecting your study of clouds to a discussion about rain, you could also have a cheese "umbrella" (I used a straw for the handle), with blueberry "raindrops."

Field Trip
Go on a walk and identify the types of clouds you see in the sky around you. Reinforce what you have learned throughout the week by looking at the sky every day and noticing the different types of clouds you see.

For Further Exploration
When we studied clouds, we also talked about rain and repeated some of the U is for Umbrella books and activities that I previously shared. Go check out those activities and see if they might fit into your cloud study as well!

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