5 Days of Halloween Homeschooling Fun: Day 1

I spent the week last week scouring Pinterest, some of my fav. blogs, and the Internet for Halloween activities and now have an entire 5 days worth of learning all based on Halloween!  I'm so excited because I think this will really pull the boys in and get them excited too.

We decided to start our day with "ghostly letters."

Really it's just shaving cream spread onto a place mat and they can practice writing their letters (in cursive for the older boys) but I thought if I gave it a Halloween name they'd really love it.

Don't get me wrong, even if I didn't name it my kids would've loved it.  They love playing in shaving cream and it's something we just don't do often enough for them.  After they practiced a few letters and their names they pulled out trucks and animals and played in the shaving cream for a while.

We did an art project today too.  When I bought our real pumpkins last week I also purchased a few fake pumpkins at the dollar store.

I had a few ideas of how they could decorate them; wrap with white crepe paper and give them googlie eyes to make a mummy, decoupage with tissue paper for a stained glass pumpkin, paint black and give them spider legs, etc... but ultimately I just let them create with supplies we had around the house.

It was messy but fun.

They decided they wanted to paint on the pumpkins.

Ian painted a vampire (with a bloody nose- Ugh!) and Alec painted a part vampire/ part human/ part real pumpkin man.

I tried to wrap my pumpkin with crepe paper streamers to make a mummy.  I used a bit of watered- down glue to help hold it in place.

Evan just wanted a plain orange pumpkin to use as a baby to go with his large carved pumpkin so he left his blank.  They came out pretty cute.

We read Goodnight Goon and some Halloween poems and I had them copy one poem each into their writing notebooks.

I know they purposely picked the shortest poems and not necessarily their favorites but they were writing without complaining so I wasn't going to argue either.  Evan just wrote the title down in his log book and with all the difficulty he has writing most of the lower case letters that was just enough for him. 

    
For math I gave Ian and Alec a quick worksheet called pumpkin doubles and pumpkin double plus one.  They each had to roll one die; double the number and then color in their answer (Ian had to add 1 more after he doubled).  I found some large dice at the dollar store I thought they'd get a kick out of using just to add a bit of extra "fun."   Evan wanted to do a dot- to -dot and I found some Halloween ones on- line (they had tons of them at busybeekidsprintables).
  
We did a really fun science project called Frankenworms.  I found this website was full of great Halloween science activities and knew the boys would love the wiggling worms.

Basically you cut gummy worms into small strips, drop them into a cup of water with just a few tablespoons of baking soda mixed in and let them sit for 15-20 min.

Then fill up a clear glass jar with vinegar and slowly drop the worms in.  The baking soda reacts with the vinegar and the worms wiggle and move.

It was really neat to see how excited they were to watch.

While the worms were soaking I asked them what they knew about baking soda and vinegar.  They remembered we used it in our volcano and it would make bubbles and foam up a bit.  They hypothesized that the worms wouldn't really be dancing but would bubble around as the baking soda and vinegar mixed together.

We added the worms into the vinegar and watched.  We were a bit disappointed that the worms weren't moving all that much so we took them back out of the vinegar and dipped them in baking soda.

It stuck to the worms and they moved a lot more when we added them back into the vinegar; unfortunately it also made many more bubbles and it was hard to see the worms.  But it was still fun to experiment and see what would happen. 

We made some Rice Krispie pumpkins with tootsie roll stems because we were invited to a friend's house this afternoon and I wanted to have some snacks to bring with us.  This site had tons of Halloween party foods but I thought the krispie pumpkins would be fun to make and they were!

While we were waiting for the marshmallow and butter to melt together we took a virtual tootsie roll factory tour.  It was pretty neat to see how they are made. Once the video was over it showed links to several other videos and we ended up watching a caterpillar bulldozer and an excavator one too.

I wanted to start our new world history unit today too but until I woke during the night and had a brainstorm I was thinking it would have to wait until after Halloween.  The boys decided they wanted to learn about ancient Egypt and the Pyramids.  I finally realized I could tie it all in with mummies!

We didn't do all that much today though, we found Egypt on the map and read one short book on Pyramids and Mummies.   I figured that was enough of an introduction for today.   We learned all sorts of new vocabulary words like Pharaoh, preserve, sarcophagus, embalm, etc.
    
 It was a great day.

 After lunch the boys watched a new Wild Kratts movie and then played outside.  We plan on going to our friend's house and using their bounce house after they get out of school.  It will be great to get some fresh air and exercise as well as visit and socialize.

Others in the series:

Homeschooling Halloween Day 2
Homeschooling Halloween Day 3 
Homeschooling Halloween Day 4
Homeschooling Halloween Day 5