After years of hating Halloween, the kids are helping me change my perspective. We live in one of the best neighborhoods for Halloween, and it’s high time I enjoy it. In fact, last spring as we searched for a new home, we felt a sense of relief knowing we would stay in our beloved neighborhood. It’s the type of community where families play outside together, take walks, ride bikes, and know the neighbors. On Halloween night, hundreds of children will line the sidewalks escorted by parents clad in costumes. Families living on cul-de-sacs will invite others to join them for snacks and activities. This neighborhood makes Halloween night exactly what it should be- filled with community fellowship, and I want the quads to experience every bit of it.

When October rolled around, a family friend gave each of the quads a Halloween themed book. Little did she know, these books would help stir the spirit of Halloween. As I read these toddler books, it brought to mind the nostalgic parts of Halloween, and the reasons kids adore it. As I read, I began explaining the process of trick-or-treating and other spooky traditions, increasing our anticipation of the holiday.  In addition to the books gifted to us, I scored a treasure trove of Scholastic books at our community garage sale, which resulted in a decent collection of Halloween themed toddler books.  Since I’m a sucker for thematic crafts and activities, we spent the month of October creating a gallery of Halloween themed art loosely tied to toddler literature.  Check out my post about literacy based crafts to see how I approach these.  We read several if not all of these books at least once daily.

We kicked off our Halloween literacy based crafts with Five Little Pumpkins paired with  a paper plate jack-o-lantern craft. The book is actually a poem, and the quads now recite  it as I read, which melts my heart every single time.

To create the craft, each child painted a plate with orange tempera paint (mixed with a few drops of dish soap). When the paint was dry, I dotted glue on the plate where the face should go, and let them add facial features (pre-cut them from black construction paper). I finished it off by tracing their hands on green construction paper to create leaves and a stem.

Stay tuned to find out what other crafts make up our Halloween art gallery.  I’ll be posting a new one daily until Halloween.

Hugs!

Amber