Do you celebrate Halloween where you live? Here in Australia, Halloween is getting bigger each year. If you are anything like me, you’ll find Halloween a great excuse to dress up and get creative with some simple Halloween play ideas for your little learners!
This month inside our Little Play Club membership, I created a fun Monster Play Pack filled with simple and scary play ideas and printables for our community to enjoy with their little monsters! It’s been so lovely seeing how they’ve been using the resources with their children so we’ve made it available for you to purchase for your family right here!
Today I’d love to share some simple play invitations you can use with your little learners to celebrate Halloween this month!
Spider Fine Motor Transferring
To create this easy fine motor invitation, I ducked into our local dollar store to grab a pack of spiders and added them to a tray along with some sand. We used our jumbo tweezers* to pick up and transfer the spiders into a bowl. This is a great activity to practice fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. If you have kids who are a little older, you could extend the invitation by counting the spiders!
Halloween Play Dough Tray
Play dough is always a go-to in our house! It’s such a wonderful tool for strengthening the little muscles in your child’s fingers and hands as well as being an amazing sensory experience for our little learners!
My favourite recipe for play dough is this No-Cook Play Dough recipe! Add your play dough to a sectioned tray from your local dollar store along with some loose parts and cookie cutters and you have yourself a simple Halloween play invitation! These fun Halloween cutters would be perfect to add too!
Spider Hand-print Process Art
It isn’t Halloween without a Spider Hand! For this simple Halloween craft activity, we painted webs on a piece of orange paper using black, white and grey paints. We then used handprints using fingers (without thumbs) to make spider prints on separate paper. Then we cut out the handprints and glued them onto webs with some googly eyes too!
This simple craft activity develops so many different learning skills all through play! We even added some cotton tips for making the webs to really work those fine motor skills as our toddler used her pincer grip (thumb and pointer finger together) to grasp the cotton tip!
Monster Play Dough
Use the play dough you made earlier with some of our Monster Play Dough mats from our Monster Play Pack! Simply print them off, laminate and cut out ready to add to a tray for a fun fine motor invitation this Halloween!
We created two different styles – one with just monsters on them for your little learner to roll long play dough snakes and balls to place into the outlines. These mats are wonderful for developing visual discrimination skills as they estimate the size of the snakes they need to fit inside the space.
The Monster Counting Mats are wonderful for developing early number skills as your little learner makes each numeral from play dough and rolls that many spots to fit on each monster too! Both of these sets are available in the Monster Play Pack among lots of other fun printables and play ideas!
Halloween Spider Oobleck
One of my favourite sensory bases is Oobleck! To make your own, mix 2 cups cornflour with 1 cup water and add a splash of orange food colouring (Halloween themed of course!) Add it to a tray with some spiders from your local dollar store for a fun Halloween sensory play activity!
You could change it up by adding googly eyes, biodegradable glitter, or even hiding spiders inside the oobleck! Get creative and see what wonderful play you can come up with together.
Monster Dot Sticker Activities
As part of our Monster Play Pack this month, we created some exciting dot sticker printables! These printables are perfect for developing fine motor skills, visual discrimination skills, tracking, colour matching and patterning too.
Simply print off the pages most suited to your little learner (grab them here) and pair them with some coloured dot stickers from Amazon US* or Amazon AUS* ready for some fun Monster play! These dot sticker activities are also perfect for travel – whether you’re off on a plane, going on a road trip or even just while you wait at the Doctor’s office for an appointment. We LOVE dot stickers and some of these activities can be used with dot markers just as easily.
I hope you found some exciting ideas to try with your little learner this Halloween! It’s such a fun time of the year for making some pretty special memories with your family – whether you go all out and get dressed up for Trick or Treating, or whether you stay home and do some Halloween play! Don’t forget to grab a copy of our Monster Play Pack for all your scary needs this month.
I would LOVE to see these Halloween activities in action at your home or classroom! Tag me over on Instagram using the #littlelifelonglearners hashtag and tagging me @littlelifelonglearners so I can see what you’re up to!
*This blog post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I will earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). All of the products I link to are things we have personally used and loved!