I began homeschool-preschooling my boys in 2020 and we have loved it ever since.
We did (and still do!) our regular homeschool preschool (calendar time, learning board, and letter-of-the-week activities), but our favorite part of doing preschool together at home is celebrating holidays as part of our homeschool. And one of my boys’ all-time favorite holidays to celebrate was Halloween!
The following are the preschool Halloween activities I did with my two boys, documented both for my own reference and to help fellow parents out there looking for some Halloween fun with their kiddos.
For the record, my boys were ages 4 and 2 at the time that we did these activities. All the following activities were both doable and enjoyable for those ages.
Candy Corn Counting
Materials:
- 10 foam pumpkin cutouts (found at the craft store)
- Sharpie or black marker
- Candy corns
Label the foam pumpkins cutouts with numbers 1-10. Count out the candy corns and set the correct amount onto the corresponding pumpkin shape.
5 Little Pumpkins Poem and Craft
Materials:
- Construction paper
- Popsicle sticks
- Glue
- Pumpkin cutouts (2.5 inches)
- Crayons
Read and/or memorize the poem “5 Little Pumpkins.” There are lots of book versions of this poem if you’d rather read it from a book, but you can just recite the poem a few times together from memory.
The poem goes as follows:
Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late!" The second one said, "There are witches in the air!" The third one said, "But we don't care!" The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run!" The fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun!" Then "Woo!" went the wind and out went the light And five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.
Then make your craft. Use Elmer’s glue to glue the popsicle sticks onto construction paper to make a fence/gate image. Then use crayons (or any coloring utensil) to draw faces on five pumpkin cutouts. My older son drew his own faces while my younger asked me to draw his faces for him (he didn’t quite have the same drawing skills) which I did under his specific directions. Use a glue stick to glue these pumpkins to the tops of the fence posts.
I also wrote numbers above the pumpkins to reiterate the counting aspect of the poem. Then repeat the poem, this time pointing to each pumpkin as appropriate.
Pumpkin Face Matching and Sorting Game
I found a free printable here for the very cute pumpkins.
There are lots of other great Halloween activities on this site, but specifically I printed and used the Big and Small Pumpkin Sorting game. It comes with both big and small sizes of identical pumpkins.
I cut them out and laminated all the pumpkins. Then we used the pumpkins for two games: first, we sorted the pumpkins by size, big or small. Second, we matched the small pumpkins to the big ones. Use lots of descriptive vocabulary as you play these games.
Ghost Cotton Ball Craft
Materials:
- White construction paper
- Sharpie or black marker
- Elmer’s glue
- Cotton balls
Use a sharpie and draw a basic picture of a ghost onto white construction paper (or you could print a clipart image from the internet). Let your child glue cotton balls all over the ghost.
Note that my younger son just wanted to outline his ghost while my older covered his ghost entirely; let them be creative and unique!
I left our ghosts as is and hung them up for decoration, but you could also cut out your ghost shape. Try taping string to the back to form a loop to hang your ghost by.
Inflate a Ghost Science Experiment
Materials:
- Baking soda
- Vinegar
- Empty bottle
- Orange or white balloon (notice that my balloon was obviously really cheap and lame; once inflated, the orange color faded to a sort of pinkish and didn’t look nearly as cool it otherwise could have)
- Sharpie
Draw a ghost face on your balloon.
Fill the bottle with vinegar. Fill the balloon with baking soda. Without spilling the baking soda, carefully fit the balloon hole over the entire bottle opening. Dump the baking soda out of the balloon into the vinegar below.
Watch and enjoy as the chemical reaction produces enough gas to inflate the balloon and expand your ghost face.
Explain in preschool-age, but still accurate, scientific lingo what’s going on in this experiment and why the balloon inflated.
Candy Corn Shape Craft
- Black construction paper
- White crayon
- Candy corn
- Elmer’s glue
Using the white crayon, draw several large shapes onto black construction paper. Let your child glue candy corns along the shape outlines to form the shapes. Of course discuss the different shapes and how many sides and corners they have, etc.
This is my second son’s final product. He’s too young to use the glue by himself, so I put the glue on and he applied the candy corns. Doesn’t it look so neat and lovely?
This is my first son’s final page. He glued the candy corns onto his triangle but then he got distracted. He was only just learning how to spell and write entire words and got super excited when he saw me using the white crayon on the black paper and so he wanted to try it himself. He’d just learned to spell “BOO” after seeing it on our decorative Halloween sign, but he wrote it backwards from right to left (beneath the triangle shape). I then tried to return him to the activity at hand and I reminded him to keep gluing the candy corns around his other shapes. You can see his response written plainly, but still backwards, inside his circle: “No.” Well, I’m always saying to let them be unique and creative, and this is part of that too I guess.
Pumpkin Name Unscramble
This activity is to practice recognizing and spelling their name.
Materials:
- Black construction paper
- Pumpkin cutouts (2.5 inches)
- Sharpie or black marker
- Glue stick
Write out your child’s name with one letter on one pumpkin cutout. Scramble all the letter-pumpkins together in a big jumble. Have the child pick out the letters and glue them in their correct order to correctly spell their name.
Paint Pumpkins
Materials:
- Pumpkins
- Washable paints (for the sake of their little hands)
- Child paint brushes
- Something to protect your surface and keep it clean such as a plastic tablecloth, newspapers, paper plates, etc.
This is obviously a great activity to practice those fine motor skills. Further, I put out a variety of colors and let them mix them together to their heart’s content. It’s a fun and simple reminder about how colors mix, a topic we had previously covered in great detail throughout our preschooling.
Bake Pumpkin Cookies
Baking and cooking is a great activity with lots of opportunities for learning. First, obviously, you’re working on the life skill of navigating a kitchen and learning how to cook.
Second, you’re using a lot of math skills with counting and measuring. Preschoolers obviously won’t understand the concept of fractions when the recipe calls for a 1/2 cup, but compare the sizes of your measuring cups and spoons; point out that you’ll use more flour than brown sugar because you used the larger measuring cup. It’s great practice for reviewing early math concepts like more or less and bigger or smaller.
If you don’t like pumpkin cookies (I’m so sorry!), baking anything together will still do the trick. Pick your favorite fall recipe and get to it!
Get to It!
I hope that these activities give you a great foundation for celebrating Halloween with your littles and incorporating such a fun holiday into you preschool experience.
If you have other suggestions for Halloween preschool activities, please leave them in the comments below.
Happy Halloween and happy homeschooling!
