A Very Preschool Halloween

How do you celebrate Halloween with little ones? Carefully. Some children are easily scared, but most twos really don’t get what all the fuss is about. At our school we focus on the seasonal aspects of Halloween. There’s a lot of orange and black, some extra dress-up available, and subtle room decor changes. Children who wish to wear their costumes to school may, though that’s our everyday rule and not a change for Halloween. Sometimes the whole pre-K class decides as a group to wear costumes and they visit the other classes to show them off.

In my classroom we put some pumpkins out in the kitchen area (above) to change the decorations slightly from our usual fruit bowl. Since we had sand in the sensory table at the same time, you can be sure that everything that started in the kitchen ended up holding sand at some point. We also had plenty of orange and black paper and paint. I’ve resisted trying it in the past, but this year I used the “Make it Shimmer” and “Make it Glitter” paint additives you can buy so that matching paint and paper would show up against each other. I do actually love glitter paint, but I’ve never bothered to make my own with the additives before. I must say I liked the effect, though you can’t really tell from my picture.

Older children have the opportunity to nail golf tees into large pumpkins (like we do with styrofoam), and sometimes we open up pumpkins to show to the children. This year the week before Halloween was short because of fall break and we had many absent children, so we skipped the pumpkin opening. Pumpkins and their guts get dumped in the garden when we’re done so we can watch the vines grow in the spring. Older children are also presented with a variety of face paints in addition to extra dress-up.

The only thing that might be counted as crafty is that we let the kids paint their own mini pumpkins. We tend to stay away from crafty activities because art for twos should be about exploring the medium rather than beginning with an end in mind. Some of the mini pumpkins were so covered in paint it was hard to tell there was a pumpkin underneath!

I didn’t take a picture of it, but we also try to have Halloween books available. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find Halloween books for young twos. Yes, I know that Five Little Pumpkins is a great book/fingerplay. But much of what’s out there seems to be for older kids. I’d love some ideas if anyone has them.

So what do you do to celebrate Halloween with young ones?

Water: The Simplest of All Art Supplies

Teaching twos is kind of like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.  Some years, we have paint-eaters.  Other years, we have paint artists.  Some years, we have both in the same class.

I like to start the year with something simple at the easel.  I’ve had one year when no one knew what to do at an easel because they’d never seen one before, so it’s good to start simply.  Here’s a shot of my beautiful art (the kids hadn’t arrived yet) using water on dark paper.  Any dark paper works, so if you’re feeling purple, blue, green, red, or black this is the activity for you.  Fat brushes seem to work better than thin ones.  And since this picture was taken on the first day I supplied three cups on each side of the easel so that if everyone wanted to do it at once we could manage it.

The one negative with water is that you can’t really take the art home with you unless you’ve impregnated the paper with something that will bleed.  That’s a whole other art activity, in my mind.  The beauty of water is that you can reuse the same piece of paper over and over.  You get to watch the art disappear and you get to use words like, “evaporation,” and wonder aloud about where the water goes.  If someone puts on so much water that the paper disintegrates, well, that’s another good word to use.

In my classes this year we seem to have lots of painting pros.  We didn’t have to keep the water more than a few days before it got old.  In other years we’ve spent the first several weeks with water at the easel because of the aforementioned paint-eating (actually it’s more like brush-sucking).  Some kids like to put brushes in their hands and walk around the room.  I usually let them do this but substitute super fat stubby dry brushes so they’re less likely to stab anyone or hurt themselves.  It’s typically more about having something in hand than having a particular brush.

On a personal note, I used to set my own kids up with brushes, dark paper, and water when I needed to cook a meal.  If the water spilled it was no biggie and they felt like artists without much adult intervention.  Try it!

Dot Painters

Dot painters come by various names: bingo markers, do-a-dots, and dotters, among others. They are simple but can help kids explore a new tool for painting.

Adults usually restrict themselves to dotting with dot painters. But young children don’t have this preconception about what they’re for. They typically drag them like brushes across the page until they see someone else banging them. The child in this picture figured out how to squeeze the bottle so hard the paint dribbled out and then waved the bottle around to make splashes. Luckily Mom knew to dress her child in an old shirt for school, even if it WAS white!

Child often pound so hard that the dots look more like splashes. If you haven’t tried it, do! It’s fun and for adults it’s a little like therapy. Children also like to try to peel the pads off the top. Peeling is one of those things I redirect from since once that top is off you can’t put it back on effectively.

I use dot painters at the easel and on a table for different perspectives. Changing the angle of something makes it a slightly different experience. Dot painters are great to take outside because it’s really easy to clean mulch and dirt off them, which you can’t say for many kinds of brushes.

We have two kinds of dot painters at school. Some are refillable and some are not. The refillable ones take awhile to get the paint from the bottle into the pad, but it’s nice to be able to select your own colors or let the children pick. The non-refillable ones seem to work a little better, but your color choices are limited and sometimes the bottles can’t be reused for anything, which is wasteful. Refill dot painters with liquid watercolor or food coloring mixed with water.

A note of caution: some bingo markers are NOT nontoxic and washable. Buy dotters labeled for use with children.

Outdoor Painting on Plexiglass

The weather is getting very nice here and that makes me move everyone outside.  We like to take many of our indoor activities to the play yard when it's nice, but sometimes it's nice to have a little specialized equipment.

This first picture is a plexiglass wall that divides a small deck that stretches between the toddler yard and the 3s/4s yard (we often leave the gate open between them, so this distinction is really in the minds of the teachers only).  It can be painted on from either side.  It's starting to get a little weathered and cloudy, but you can still see through it.  The nice thing is that it's two activities in one.  The kids can paint first, and then clean it off.  We've used brushed with water, sponges, the hose, and wet towels to wash it off, but I'm sure you could think of some other ideas.

Another nice thing to have is a plexiglass easel.  The nice thing about it is that you can move it around, unlike the wall.  We also bring our regular easels out, but we have just one of these see-through ones and it's always a hit.  Maybe the fun is in painting directly on the easel with no paper or that you can see what the other person is doing on the side at the same time.  I don't know, but it's cool.  Sometimes I think the adults are more taken with it than the kids are!

Table-Sized Squishy Bag

Now that I've got the goo, I've got to do something with it.  Since my original idea was to make something large, I got lucky to find a large roll of cellophane slowly getting old in our supply room.  With one piece underneath and another for the top, I sealed it with clear packing tape.  I made three different colors of goo and sandwiched it between the cellophane.  It ended up the size of our small square table.  Now that I write this I wish I'd measured it!

The large squishy bag was passed along to several other teachers before the goo inside got too watery to be fun.  Even once the colors were all mixed together into a weird purple after two days, kids still enjoyed it.

While we value letting kids get messy, there are some children who simply don't like the feel of ooey things on their fingers.  Activities like squishy bags let them get some of the sensations without the part they dislike.  This activity can be done on an easel for a "no mess" day.  One class used it on the light table to much delight.

Allergy note: Because the goo is made from cornstarch, this activity is inappropriate for children with a corn allergy.  Parents might be willing to risk it if the goo is contained like it is here, but there is always the chance it might leak.

Colored Masking Tape Art

Kids love stickers, but those often sport characters (a no-no at my school). Guess what? They love tape, too! At the easel or around the edge of a table covered in paper I set out small bits of different colors of tape. 2s often need an adult to show them that they can take the tape off the side of the table and stick it wherever they like. 3s usually have an idea of what to do or they figure it out on their own. I also usually leave a few rolls of tape out for those who want to try ripping or cutting their own pieces. And if you have someone who is really, really desperate for stickers, you can cut tape into little squares or rectangles and put those bits on wax paper for the whole sticker procedure.

Once the tape art is complete, kids can take it home right away. No drying time! If tape is old hat, have them cover their tape with paint, markers, or crayon. Then, lift off the tape to see what happens. Now have art using the resist technique and you can talk about positive and negative images and space.

You really can never have too much masking tape, or have too many colors, or have it in too many sizes. My own children like to use it to wrap small toys with paper into "presents" for me. It's very sweet, and they get practice with three dimensional art. They also like to completely cover a paper towel tube and call it a telescope for imaginative play.

Painting With Feathers

I credit the ladies who share the room with us on alternate days for this idea. While I'm crazy let's-get-messy girl with other parts of the room I tend to be more conservative in my easel choices, mainly because the easel often gets ignored while other things are going on.

This idea is very simple: paint with long feathers for brushes. We only had a few kids try this, but the ones that did kept coming back for more. The resulting art looks vaguely like asian character painting.

Puffy Paint

Here's a recipe for an easy puffy paint.

- shaving cream
- white glue
- liquid watercolor

Every teacher I know has a slightly different proportion of shaving cream to paint. I add them until it feels good to me when I stir it. The watercolor is added after you like the way the white mixture turned out.

Yes, you can paint with just the shaving cream and the watercolor, which we also do. Adding the glue prevents the shaving cream from disappearing into nothingness when it's dry.