October themes: Thanksgiving, Woodland, Pumpkins, Halloween

Hi Everyone! I'm back again with my preschool themes for October. I know the posts are pretty close together this time, but I got behind with September and wanted to get back on track with October's! October and December are likely to be my favourite months. I love the holidays and getting to do holiday themes with my toddler is so much fun!

This month we tackled Thanksgiving, Woodlands, Pumpkins and Halloween, with varying levels of success, as it was a very busy month for us. I was busy preparing for the holidays and sorting through our winter gear to start the switch over from the warmer months to the colder ones. It quite often snows in October here, so I had a lot of work to make sure we were ready!

Thanksgiving

I know for some of you the thanksgiving theme may seem a bit early, but we live in Canada, so our thanksgiving actually falls in October, before Halloween. Considering how early winter can arrive I actually prefer this, as it still feels like fall and harvest.

This was a very busy week for us, so I had a hard time fitting in any elaborate activities. We used the fall sensory bin I have posted about in my September Themes post quite a lot. We were focusing on the letter T this week, so we did several colouring pages focusing on turkeys. I am not going to lie to you, I had a lot of work to do this week, so a lot of the activities we did were designed specifically to keep little hands busy while I worked!

We did take time to focus on manners, and to talk about what it means to be thankful. Of course we made the mandatory hand turkeys as well! I love handprint activities as it's fun to remember later how small those little hands actually were!

Woodlands

This was a very fun theme that I will likely try again soon. It felt like an extension of the fall theme, with a focus on woodland creatures.

The biggest activity we did this week was our teddy bear's picnic. I really loved this one, and had it been warmer I would have likely taken them outside for this. Instead we were stuck inside. I set up the bears and the blankets while he was sleeping the night before to surprise him and he loved it!

This is a great homeschooling activity for littles, as you can touch on so many topics. You can use it to discuss sharing and manners. You can use real or pretend food and either discuss what different animals eat(it doesn't have to be just bears) or focus on healthy snacks. You can use counting and math to count the animals and then the plates and cups to make sure you have enough. There are so many ways to use this activity!

We also went for a walk this week, and played "Simon Says" with an animal twist. "Simon says walk like a bear! Simon says hop like a frog!" We sang the "Teddy Bear's Picnic" and practiced animal sounds.

We adjusted our sensory bin to include little owls and we went to the library to pick out a bunch of books about foxes and bears and other animals. We also picked up Peppa's Fall Day, as she is a favourite in this house.

I think we are very likely to try some of these again in the winter, with a focus on animals in the wintertime instead.

Pumpkins

For our pumpkin theme we made pumpkin muffins together, and went out and got the pumpkins we intended to carve for Halloween. We also watched spookly the square pumpkin, which was a surprisingly difficult for my toddler to watch. He was quite sad for poor spookly and did not enjoy how mean the other pumpkins were. Poor kiddo!

We also decorated for halloween and have been wandering around the house counting all the pumpkins we have put out for Halloween. I drew some simple pumpkin connect the dot pages with a sharpie. Honestly, I draw a lot of his colouring sheets right now, he doesn't need anything elaborate, and he doesn't care if it's perfect anyway.

We sang the 5 little pumpkins and it was very helpful with teaching my son how to hold his fingers to show each number up to 5. I made our oranges into jack-o-lanterns for snacks and other little things like that. This week sort of became more of an extension of the Halloween theme by the end but it was still a lot of fun.

Halloween

This week has been a lot of fun so far, and we haven't even hit the end of this theme yet! We made a Halloween Garland from a craft kit I picked up at the dollar store, though it could just as easily have been made with construction paper at home.

The set we purchased were all stickers, so no gluing involved, just punching out the pieces and sticking them together. We did get to focus on making patterns though. There were 4 of each type and we laid them out in different patterns until we found the one we liked. It turned out really cute!

I kept the pieces that we punched out as well, and we made pumpkin and skeleton faces on black construction paper later. So we had 2 days of crafting instead of one, from the same kit!

We also added some plastic halloween figures to the fall sensory bin and played with that as well this week, bats and rats and snakes and spiders! We put on some halloween finger puppet plays as well.

We carved pumpkins and then roasted the seeds, which is one of my favourite Halloween activities! It provides lots of opportunity to tackle knife and scooping skills. (don't worry, we only let him help with the small carving saws, no toddlers running through the house with the carving knife or anything!)

We are likely going to bake soul cakes together later this week as well, and then of course there will be trick or treating, though that has less of a learning element involved. 😄

This was such a fun month, even if it was a bit busy. I guess we are heading into the holiday season though, so busy will be the new normal for a bit!