Leaf Rubbing

As soon as the leaves started to fall, I had been planning this one. We finally got a few rainless days, and gathered some nice leaves to use for leaf rubbing.

You just need a paper, a leaf, and some crayons.

Place the leaves under the paper, hold the paper in place, and rub over the leaf with a crayon, to get the leaf pattern on the page.

Spaghetti Squash

The other day I spotted some Spaghetti Squash at the grocery store and thought it would be a great opportunity to get my preschooler involved with cooking dinner. It's pretty cool- when it comes out of the oven (and after you scoop the 'guts' out) it looks like this:

Then you take a fork to it and gently scrape against it like this:

And then you have spaghetti-ish squash! It's pretty cool! You can even eat it with spaghetti sauce, like regular spaghetti :)

Unfortunately the day that I tried this, Talia was sick & less interested in participating than I thought she would be. I'll have to try it again another day when she's more in the mood!

Foam Pumpkin Art

My husband (Ken) is great at finding fun things to use at dollar stores. He bought these foam sheets & Hallowe'en shapes there and he & Talia had fun creating Hallowe'en "cards" together. It was Talia's idea to use the little white punch outs for the Pumpkins' eyes :)

Apple Pumpkin Stamps

I have seen this activity before but I can't remember where.

You just cut an apple in half, dip it in paint (or paint it with a paintbrush) and then use it as a stamp. We used them to make pumpkins.

We did the stamping in the evening, and since they used a lot of paint,we let them dry overnight before adding googly eyes & paper jack-o-lantern faces. (I cut out the pieces & Talia arranged them).

Magic Paint Pictures

I found this idea on Learning Vicariously. It's great for Hallowe'en, but could be used for anything! I like the idea of having Talia draw some pictures or designs herself & then painting to see what she did. I think we will do that another day, but this time she was ready to stop by the time we finished the page of Hallowe'en pictures I had drawn ahead of time for her.

How To Do This:

- draw pictures on a white paper with white crayon
- use watercolour paints to paint over & reveal the pictures!

Tissue Ghosts

This morning, Talia & I made ghosts out of tissues.

To make one of these you need:
2 tissues
1 marker
1 ribbon or pipe cleaner or string

You just crumple up one tissue, wrap the other around it (creating the head), and tie the ribbon (or string or pipe cleaner) around the neck, to hold it in place. Then add the face with a marker.

We made about 70 of them this morning (a whole box of tissues worth). We are using them for invitations to a Hallowe'en event, so we needed a lot of them :)

Observations:

Talia was able to do everything except tie the knot in the ribbon (pipe cleaner probably would've worked better for her).
She would do one 'job' for a while & then suggest that we switch jobs.
She went from crumpling the head, to cutting the ribbon, to putting the finished ghosts in the bag, to wrapping the ribbon (I got the knot ready, then she pulled the ends to make it tight).