Some Halloween Ideas from the Two's Room

Here are some things we did last October in the two's classroom.

Pumpkin Science Center

We put out different pumpkins and gourds along with pumpkin seeds, magnifying glasses, bowls, and rulers for the children to explore. 

Pumpkin Predictions 

Each of the children chose one of the pumpkins from the science center. We measured and weighed each pumpkin and I wrote down how the children described their pumpkins. Then each child predicted what they thought would be inside the pumpkins before we cut them open. Some of the predictions we got were a dinosaur, another pumpkin, and candy. 

 

Of course once we cut the pumpkins open, we saw that there were seeds inside. Everyone helped to scoop out the sticky seeds. 

And we made a jack o' lantern.

 

Seed Collage

We saved the seeds from the pumpkins and used them to make pumpkin seed collages.

Halloween Sorting

I found these Halloween erasers at Target.  We had lots of fun sorting them and making patterns with them.

 

Halloween Costume Dress Up

I found lots of Halloween costumes at Goodwill earlier in the year.  We put them in the dramatic play area along with Halloween bags and we pretended to go trick-or-treating. 

Spider Webs

We opened a bag of fake spider webs and the class helped to hang them around the classroom and put plastic spiders on them. 

Candy Corn Sorting

As a treat, we all tasted some candy corn and talked about the different colors on the candy. Then we cut strips of white, yellow, and orange paper into squares and glued them onto a paper candy corn cut-out. 

 Besides being a sorting activity, this also used lots of small motor skills as the children cut and glued. 

Happy Halloween!

Marble Balancing

This is a great small muscle activity for toddlers and twos. It requires the children to use their fingers and thumbs in order to get the marbles balanced on the golf tees.

I stuck the golf tees into a block of styrofoam so that they were perfectly upright.

Once the children mastered the skill of balancing the marbles, they took all the golf tees out and reinserted them into the styrofoam on their own.

This made balancing the marbles quite a bit trickier because many of the tees were now at an angle.

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Dry Erase Faces

I saw this idea on the Play At Home Mom blog. It looked like lots of fun, so I decided to try it out in our classroom. I searched through my many pictures and found nice face shots of all our students. I printed them out on regular paper and laminated them. I had lots of help with this because our class loves to use the laminator.

Then I cut out the pictures and got out the dry erase markers.

At first, the favorite thing to draw was glasses...

but soon we got creative.

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Simple Graphing

I read about this activity at teachpreschool.org and since our class is into counting and sorting I decided to give it a try. I used plastic bowls instead of baby food jars for the graphing materials because I didn't have enough jars in the classroom. The graph sheets I made on the computer. They are modeled after the ones used on the Teach Preschool blog. 

 Each child chose two bowls and arranged the materials from one bowl in the first column on the graphing sheet. 

Then they arranged the second set of objects on the other side of the graph. 

 After arranging the materials, the children estimated which column had more objects. 

 Then we counted each set of objects. 

 The children really enjoyed this activity and continued to work with it throughout the day. They loved choosing from the variety of math tokens and arranging them in the boxes on the graph. 

Robots

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 This is an easy magnetic play set that I made back in August. I started by collecting about fifteen aluminum cans and plastic bottle caps in a variety of colors and sizes. I also found large googly eyes and small plastic slinkies at the dollar store. Using a hot glue gun, I glued magnets onto the googly eyes, slinkies, and bottle caps. We haven't used this play set since November so when I brought it out this week it was like having a new toy. 

 Everyone was interested in making robots and we had a lot of fun with them. 

Fun with Foam Noodles

 At the end of the summer, I bought a couple of those foam noodles that kids play with in the pool. They were very cheap because it was the end of the season but once I bought them I didn't know what to do with them. Some time later, I read about this idea although I can't remember where. I cut the noodles into two- and three-inch pieces and set them out with a package of toothpicks. 

 At first the children experimented with pushing the toothpicks in and pulling them out, but soon they started to get creative. Here are some of the things they made:

 Buildings.

 Rockets. 

 

 Cakes and cupcakes. 

 Spaceships. 

This activity really allowed the children to use their imaginations. They had a blast with it and it only cost about five dollars! 

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