If you are celebrating Halloween with younger children, either at home or in an early years setting, we've got some ideas for activities that cover all areas of learning and development. We also have a printable version of our Halloween Early Years Planning Sheet available in colour or black and white.
Language and Communication
- Play a game of Halloween Costume Guess Who or a Describe the Monster game to really get the kids talking and thinking about questions.
- Go for a walk and have a conversation about the Halloween decorations that you can see. You could take a Halloween Scavenger Hunt with you.
Personal, Social and Emotional
- Halloween can be quite a scary time and celebrates fear and frightening things. Discuss fear with children. What makes us scared? How does fear feel? What can we do if we feel scared or worried?
- Use pumpkin templates to draw pictures of the faces that we make when we experience different emotions. Use this to discuss what makes us feel those emotions.
- Help the children to develop their social skills by playing turn taking games. We've got lots of Halloween games.
Physical Development
- We have got a huge collection of Halloween colouring pages. Colouring in helps children to develop the fine muscle control needed to control pencils in preparation for learning how to write.
- Practise cutting and sticking with a fun printable designing a Jack O'Lantern.
- Make some orange and black playdough to use with Halloween themed playdough mats.
- Play musical statues using Halloween party music. Encourage children to move their bodies in different ways. Can they crawl like a cat? Float like a ghost? Shuffle like a zombie?
Literacy
- Visit the library to look for some Halloween books. Try a Halloween Picture Book Scavenger Hunt to encourage the children to explore lots of books.
- Work together to write a spooky Halloween story. Use some Halloween story paper to create a scary book.
Maths
- Brownies are easy and fun to make. Children learn about measurement when they help us to weigh out ingredients and set a timer on the oven. Give brownies a Halloween theme by making these ghostly brownies.
- We've got a huge (and still growing!) collection of Halloween maths worksheets, including size sorting, peg cards and I Spy counting sheets.
Understanding the World
- Learn about spiders. Go outside to see if there are any spiders' webs to look at. Discuss why spiders spin their webs.
- Talk about Halloween memories. Can the children remember Halloween last year? Did they dress up? Did their families dress up? Talk about your own experience of Halloween as a child - you could share your own photographs.
Expressive Arts
- Get the kids involved in designing and creating a Halloween window display.
- Try some Halloween wax resist paintings.
- Make some wooden spoon puppets for the children to create their own stories.
Printable Planning Sheet
You can download a printable version of this planning sheet here:
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Monday, 17th October 2022