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?

Baby Washing

After I took this picture I realized how creepy it looked, so let me explain.

We sometimes put soapy water in our sensory table.  We often wash dishes or just play with the water.  We also like to wash the babies (well, baby dolls).  The kids get great joy out of this activity.  We provide lots of washcloths and large towels so the babies can be washed, dried, and wrapped up in a nice, warm towel.  They usually get fed at some point after this, too, and then put to bed.

Our school has special babies for washing.  Yup, they live in a crate in the supply room labeled, “Babies for Washing.”  Why?  Because babies with movable limbs get water inside that’s difficult to get out and that eventually gets mildewed.  Our washing babies are either sealed or they are old enough that we don’t care much what happens to them.  While we’re washing babies I put our regular classroom babies out of sight so the kids aren’t tempted to add to the collection of bathing beauties.

The tricky thing, whether it’s dishes or babies, is that other things will migrate to the sensory table.  It’s helpful to decide in advance what you’re willing to allow so you’re not caught off guard.  My personal feeling is that if I can clean it up and there’s no harm to be done by letting them try, I let them.  But things that might rust, mildew, or dissolve I don’t allow.  You’ll have to decide if you can stand painty water from hands that were just at the easel; I don’t have a problem with it.  You have to wash and bleach the dolls at the end of the day anyway, so what’s a little paint?

Why Yes, We Have Indoor Running Water

We often think of the sensory table as holding objects that the children manipulate but are unchanging without the children present.  If you’ve got a 2-year-old in your life you know they are fascinated by running water.  One option is to let them play in the sink.  But sometimes that’s not desirable or you’re looking for something a little different.  So why not add a little running water to your sensory table?

Here I’ve moved our sensory table to be nearer to the sink than it normally is.  We have guttering outside in the sand areas so kids can build water paths, so we cleaned some off and used duct tape to attach it to our classroom faucet.  We tried propping it up, but the kids kept knocking it over when they tried to put things in it.  Our classroom is lucky enough to have a second sink nearby, so we were still able to easily keep hands clean while we had our gutter.

Along with typical water stuff we also supplied different kinds of floating and sinking balls that they could roll down the gutter.  They tried putting just about everything small that was in the room (not just balls) down the gutter and got a good sense of what would work and what wouldn’t.  We talked about floating, sinking, rolling, sliding, friction, size, and weight, among other things.

The tricky thing with this setup is the drain.  We had to keep an eye on the water level to make sure that it got drained frequently.  If you’re doing this outside with a hose, just set your drain to let water out as the water comes in.  Otherwise, an adult with a bucket has to be on standby most of the time.  The kids enjoyed helping to drain the table, so we never reached overflow.  I also recommend keeping the water flow small.  If you’re outside, go for a higher flow or let the kids control the flow.

If you’re at home, rig up something that goes from your sink to somewhere else, maybe the floor with some towels.  You can use a small hose, some gutter, or plastic tubing.  Outside is probably the best place for home water play, but the tub is a viable option as well though not as novel.

Sawdust, Wood, and Woodland Animals

Sometimes kids surprise you. Usually I think of the sensory table as a place to scoop, dig, dump, and build. With 2s and 3s it's easy to forget that some kids are ready for more imaginative play.

The other day I arrived to find someone had emptied out the sensory table. I forget what I had planned, but it was gone. Since I share a room with other teachers on alternate days, this sometimes happens. Looking in desperation for something safe for our student with allergies, I found a container of sawdust. It's actually more like small wood curls than sawdust.

Great, now what? More scoops and shovels? Wait, there were little logs that were part of a natual building set. I borrowed some of those and then headed to the cabinet where we keep animals. There was a box labeled "Woodland." I think it was a stretch to call some of those animals woodland creatures, but I wasn't feeling picky at the moment.

I WAS proud of myself that wood had figured in each element in the table even though no one else would notice (my co-teacher actually did, though). I realized that we'd have to add scoops later because the kids wouldn't know what to DO with animals, logs, and wood bits, but it looked nice to start with.

It turns out that the kids played with that setup all morning. They fed the animals, they build little homes out of the logs. They gave the animals dialogue. It was super to get such a reminder that sometimes they are ready to be more creative and that we don't have to make all the decisions for them.

Pole Bean Tipi/Teepee Hideout

The picture here is from a few years ago, but this is a yearly favorite of my kids at home. At school we don't really have a spot for this because there's already a nice garden. At home it moves year to year, always going to the spot where we think nothing else will grow.

So, what you've got here are three V-shaped trellises turned upside down and tied together making a 4-sided shape, roughly a tetrahedron, with one side open. We also hang yarn or string (something that will decompose eventually) horizontally around the structure so the bean plants have something to climb on. I don't bother with the careful preparation of the ground (gardeners, put down your scary-looking shovels for this blasphemy). I just dig a trench in front of the trellis, add some lose dirt, plant the beans, and water. The year this picture was taken we put cardboard underneath the tipi because whatever was growing there before gave my daughter a rash. It made it a nice place to hideout.

As for what to grow, choose any bean that will climb. I'm not a gardener and I couldn't find any seeds labeled "pole beans," (stop laughing, you gardeners out there) but I found lots of climbers. We like to plant colorful ones. Even though we eat beans at home I can't seem to get anyone interested in eating these beans. The kids love to pick the pods and shell them. They get used as play money, treasure, and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time. Purple beans are the most fun because of the unusual color for a food.

Some tips:

- Thin the bean plants! If you grow too many they will grow into the center of the structure, leaving no room for children. You'll also get pods that rot before they have a chance to make nice, fat, beans.

- Consider a larger structure. This tipi is really only big enough for one or two children at a time. We've used trellises up against the fence for a tunnel before and this year we're going to prop some up against our deck, which is high and has a nice secret space underneath.

- Weed and water, if necessary. While beans grow fast, the weeds seem to grow faster and will choke out the beans quickly if you don't stay on it. This is one time when the kids will weed for you because they want their tipi.

As I said, I'm not a gardener, but somehow this works for me every year. It's nice to have on a hot day and it teaches kids something about gardening without it being a crisis if the beans don't grow the way you want them to. If you are a gardener I'm sure there are lots of very good lessons just waiting to be learned with the tipi, but we mostly just enjoy ours. I'm hoping that having my kids learn to enjoy being with plants will motivate them to learn how to keep my house plants alive. *I* certainly don't know how to do it!

Note: I found two acceptable spellings of this structure, tipi and teepee. I don't know which is the preferred, so feel free to tell me.

Grocery Shopping

One of my fellow teachers asked the parents in her class to bring in clean boxes and containers of things they purchased at a grocery store. They got a deluge! The packages have been making their way around the building and this week it's our turn.

An entire toy shelf was dedicated to grocery items, with toy fruits and vegetables put in short bins on a table to look like the produce section. We had several cash registers, shopping carts, and lots of paper shopping bags. Two of the shopping carts have pretend infant seats, so of course several children brought their "babies" along.

My 3s this year are a little younger than the last time I taught this age, so they mostly did shopping only. Older kids will take the shopping over to the play kitchen to put the groceries away and maybe make a meal. Also, this group of children didn't play with each other but relied upon the adults to ask them what they would do next. In the past the children have gotten so involved taking on different roles (cashier, bagger, parent, etc.) it was fun to watch. It was much more hands-on for the adults this year.

Allergy Note: For the most part this is an allergy friendly activity, but if you have a severe allergy in your class you might consider removing any packages that once contained the allergen, such as peanut butter for a peanut allergic child. You could also wash the outsides of all the containers and then seal them shut, but I guarantee SOMEONE will try to get them open no matter how much tape you use.