Halloween Learning Activities

I am so excited to be participating in the 30 Days of Halloween Blogger Series with Allison from the Cupcake Diaries. There have been so many darling craft and recipe ideas so far! Get your pinning fingers ready because you will want to recreate the fun and creative ideas linked up below.

With my children I try to mesh learning with holiday fun as much as possible. My oldest daughter especially learns best with lots of hands-on activities. When I saw these mini gourds at Wal-mart for under $3 a bag, I knew that they would be perfect for math manipulatives. Math manipulatives that double as cute decorations = one happy mom!

I had my husband pick up stickers at the store so the children could number the pumpkins. The stickers ended up not sticking so well – next time I’ll just use markers.

I included all three children in our pumpkin math. These activities work well for the 2-6 year old crowd. We started with number recognition and numbering the pumpkins. My youngest isn’t talking a lot yet so it was mostly a fine motor activity for him where I introduced him to the number and he put the sticker on. For my four and six year olds, we took turns saying which number came next before we put it on the pumpkin. There were extra stickers so it turned into a matching game as well for my four year old. Do you see how the possibilities are endless? So many easy math games to do!

Once the stickers were on, my two oldest put the pumpkins in numerical order. You can tell that my two boys thought the gourds made fun costume pieces as well. They thought the green gourds were the perfect noses!

While the stickers and numerical order activities were my idea – my children came up with awesome ideas well! Lily choose to do the matching numbers while Cortland decided to make a pattern with the pumpkins. He ordered the pumpkins based on texture – bumpy, smooth, bumpy, smooth. Love how their little minds work! It reminds me that it’s my job to provide the materials and the positive learning environment, but then it is time to step back and let them run with it!

For our last activity, we did math with the pumpkins. We used the sticker value of each of the pumpkins to practice addition and math until the stickers fell off. After that we used the physical number of pumpkins to make math problems. My daughter had so much fun and reused the stickers as answers for her math problems. It was a fun way to start our Halloween activities and sneak in a math review as well!

Be sure to check out the rest of the amazing Halloween projects!

What are your favorite Halloween traditions?

This post is linked up to Tot School as well.