Toddlers – Page 14 – Fun Family Home

Hallowe'en can be as fun or as scary as you want it to be. In our house, we make Hallowe'en fun. Hallowe'en is celebrated on 31st October each year. Many people dress up and go trick-or-treating. It's also a time to go pumpkin picking and use the pumpkins to decorate your house or have carving competitions between friends and family. Hallowe'en is a great theme to have in your house for the weeks running up to the end of October. There are so many different, fun ideas out there based around this topic with lots of sensory play too. Here are 7 activities you can do with your toddler or pre-schooler this Hallowe'en. Hallowe'en Playdough Fun Make a Witch's Potion or Stew Decorate Your House Decorate a Pumpkin Sticker Activities Spider Web Game Go Pumpkin Picking 1. Hallowe'en Playdough Fun Playdough is a great tool for practising your little one's fine motor skills. There are some great ideas around for playdough at this time of year. We've made bright orange playdough using food gels but you can also make scented playdoughs using spices such a pumpkin spice to give added sensory play. Here is the recipe we used for making our bright orange playdough. We made it as an 'invitation to play' with some little bits and bobs to be added to the pumpkin as the children want. Ideal for this are: shortened glitter pipe cleaners matchsticks googly eyes pine cones acorns plastic spiders You can also get Hallowe'en themed cookie cutters at this time of year which are great for playdough play. Black playdough would be great for creating Hallowe'en spiders. 2. Make a Witch's Potion or Stew I made dragon's eyes by pouring lime jelly into a Tomy egg box and adding a blueberry to each "eye" and allowing it to set in the fridge. It also worked using ceramic and plastic egg cups. I attempted to make them using plastic Easter eggs but they had holes in which didn't hold the jelly even with cellotape over them. I, then, searched our cupboards for other "ingredients" we could use. We used: green and purple coloured water for the spooky liquid cornflour to add a murkiness to the liquid spaghetti strands for "hair" orange jelly sunflower petals rosemary cut from our garden for fragrance coconut for "dried bones" plastic spiders mini marshmallows with a pen dot as "newts' eyes" confetti (though I wouldn't advise this as it made clearing away really tricky as I didn't want it going down the plughole) And then we used any cooking implements and other mixing equipment we could find such as wooden spoons and spatulas, a McFlurry spoon from McDonalds, pipettes and scoops. It looked revolting and my pre-schooler absolutely loved this activity. So much so that we did it twice with slightly different "ingredients". 3. Decorate Your House These are some Hallowe'en window stickers we picked up for a couple of pounds from a discount shop. They can be applied to windows and re-applied over and over so will keep kids occupied for a while. My little one enjoyed making a pattern - pumpkin - something else - pumpkin - something else - pumpkin etc. Other fab ideas are creating Hallowe'en bunting from paper and placing shop-bought skeletons and spiders' webs around your house. 4. Decorate a Pumpkin Get some pumpkins and either paint or use felt pens to decorate them as you wish. The great thing about this is that it will wash off and is another activity altogether. You could set up a washing pumpkin station and give old toothbrushes or scrubbing brushes and invite the kids to clean off the pumpkins. I'd love to grow my own pumpkins but I know they take up a lot of space in the garden. I once grew a butternut squash and it had such long tendrils. One of the pumpkins above was home grown by my parents at their allotment. Shop now 5. Sticker Activities Loads of shops sell Hallowe'en stickers at this time of year. We found a fab pack in The Range and have been busily using them on our Hallowe'en pictures. One that we particularly enjoyed was decorating a pumpkin (on paper). My daughter decorated the pumpkin with stickers and felt pens and she created a fab design. 6. Spider Web Game This is a great fine motor activity for little fingers. Just grab items you have around the home and make this Hallowe'en activity. We used a small storage basket, wool from my craft projects and plastic spiders. The aim was to rescue the spiders from the web. 7. Pumpkin Picking Pumpkin picking has grown in popularity over the past few years. We managed to find a farm not too far from us where entry is free (correct as of October 2022). You just pay for the pumpkins you pick and any fairground rides or food and drink that you purchase. It was a fab hour or so in glorious sunshine. We wore wellies as we weren't sure how muddy it would be and dressed our pre-schooler in her Hallowe'en tutu for some cute photos. The farm had created several photo opportunities around the pumpkin field and it was a lot of fun. Our pre-schooler's favourite bit was pushing the pumpkins round in the child-sized orange wheelbarrow. We took our one-year-old in a baby sling which turned out to be the best idea due to the terrain. Happy Hallowe'en everyone!