Halloween 2016 Sensory Tray

We had some halloween fun this week with our sensory tray. This was packed with lots of learning opportunities for all ages.

The younger ones enjoyed the sensory feel of the beans and lentils as well as developing their motor skills through using tools to fill and empty containers.

For the older children there were more mathematical opportunities including number recognition when they found the hidden numbers as well as weighing and counting. We used lots of mathematical language to describe the things that were heavier, lighter, smaller and bigger as well as counting out our beans into pots.

All this was combined with the imaginative play created by the introduction of scary spiders, slimy names and various other halloween paraphanalia!

Halloween 2015

The children get so excited about Halloween so this year I thought of a few activities that hey could engage in. Play dough is always a great hit so we first made some monsters from the play dough. The children used their fine motor skills to design and create their monsters and enjoyed telling the other children about their monster!

Sensory trays are fabulous learning resources with children of all ages and one child has been asking me for waterbeds for a long time so this was a great opportunity. We used the black beads with some cups and cutlery that enabled imaginative conversations from the older children and use of fine motor skills from our one year old who enjoyed moving the beads from pot to pot and feeling them with her hands. 

The older children enjoyed some artistic drawing, both designing the face on their pumpkins and creating a halloween themed silhouettes on coffee filters that they then painted with watercolour paints to give a sunset background. The younger children made their silhouettes from using coloured tissue paper and the combination of these gave us a great halloween display!

Halloween Sensory Play

We like any excuse for some sensory play here and a Halloween themed tray was a perfect excuse to engage!

This year we used water beads, the beads normally used in flower vases! These are great for sensory and fine motor skills as the children try and pick them up, both with fingers and spoon, and pour them into various cups and pots. I added some other halloween goodies and off they went.

 As ever we saw some great imaginary play with the children making wonderful potions. The aspect they were most fascinated with was pouring the slimy beads from one cup to the other, using their descriptive language to talk about the feel of the beads.

Painted Pumpkins

The children were so excited about buying the pumpkins in preparation for Halloween so I wanted to get them more involved. Obviously they are a bit young for carving so we decided to decorate them first.

We used the pearl acrylic paints straight from the bottle so that they would be easy to squeeze out. Whilst some simply squeezed the colours directly onto the top of the pumpkins and let the paint dribble slowly down the smooth surface of the pumpkin, others used their pumpkin as a canvas and requested paintbrushes to mix up the paint. 

The colours all began to blend together and actually looked quite stunning pieces of art although they did take several days to dry and were only just ready in time for carving our halloween faces! Once lit, the children were delighted with them. 

Halloween Sensory Tray

The children are becoming aware that it will soon be halloween so I decided to incorporate a little sensory fun into our day with this Halloween themed sensory tray. 

 Our tray contains a few halloween themed items such as cups, spoons, spooky shaped cutters and some plastic fingers and skeletons for effect but the main fun comes from the orange lentils and the black beans. As ever with the sensory trays, the pouring and scooping of the beans brought out some lovely imaginative stories as well as enabling the younger ones to practice spoon control.