Our Halloween Theme

We really love holidays in our classroom. The kids get excited about it, and so do we. There are always tons of interesting holiday books, and it's fun getting our whole classroom decorated with the theme as we do projects for that holiday all month long.

I'm starting with Halloween. Here are a few of the projects we did. We have a lot of three year olds right now, so most of our projects are on the simpler side.

One of my favorite Halloween projects was our Halloween Haunted Houses. I need to find a more zoomed in picture of one of them, and once I do I'll share.  For our Haunted Houses we had the kids draw on their moons, or trees or whatever they wanted to draw in the background first. Then we had them use any of our three watercolor colors: black, purple and blue. Once the backgrounds had dried, we had squares and triangles cut out so that they could put together their houses. We also had little tiny Halloween-y confetti type pieces (in the shape of black cats, ghosts, pumpkins and spiders) for them to glue down. This was a fun one, and the kids were all really proud of their haunted houses.

I saw candy corn handprints over at It's a Preschool Party's blog and they were so cute that I just had to do it with the kids! Instead of having all of the kids do this during our learning time, I just got out everything I'd need during area time so that they could make one if they wanted to. As you can see, our candy corn handprints didn't turn out quite as perfect as the ones on the blog. I'm sure that if I'd painted their hands and stamped them onto the paper for them, we could've gotten perfect ones too, but I wanted to let the kids do it on their own.

We had fun with these witches too. I'm a big fan of using recycled materials, so when I got the crimpy black paper in my Julep box, I knew I'd have to find a use for it. We had fun putting together our witches and wearing them later (that's the really fun part).

Any time we have a theme, I try to leave some room for some free art. We ended up with some neat Halloween-themed paintings.

Our Frankenstein's Monsters

Both of these were projects that we did during center time, because they were pretty simple.

I found these mummy's on Chadwick's Picture Place  and thought they were too cute not to do. We used crepe paper instead of gauze and used smaller googly eyes (because that's what we had). One problem we had was that we used the cheap glue instead of nice glue that actually dries clear. I'd definitely recommend elmer's for this project because the mummies looked a little gross with the yellow glue under the bandages.

I do some sort of Jack-o-lanterns every year, with every age group. I wanted to do these with our Preschoolers to make sure that all of them could assemble a face with eyes, nose and a mouth in the correct spots.

I thought these were really cute. I had the kids do them all by themselves, so they all turned out different.

We did some spider webs, painting with q-tips. My mother in law has a really neat halloween hole punch that we used to punch out the spiders.

Our last halloween project was clothespin bats. We had a lot of fun with these! I cut out the bodies and wings separately and we decorated them, then assembled them, then glued them onto our clothespins. It was hard to make them hang upright unless we clipped something in them, so I made sparkly letters to spell out Happy Halloween for them to hold.

Any theme we do, we do several art projects that they take home, along with several activities that don't have any sort of product to take home. My favorite of these for the Halloween theme was our Frankenstein's monster pudding cups! We all had a lot of fun drawing our faces on, scooping the pudding in, topping it with Oreo bits and (of course) eating them.

 My favorite part of this is seeing how different everyone's pudding cups were.