Halloween Fun Schooling

Since our schedule was so crazy for the month of October, and I am very pregnant we divided our Halloween fun schooling activities into two weeks. This post includes more of what I did with the littles, but there are still a few things for the big kids too. This post shares more of what I did with the big kiddos for our Halloween Funschooling.

No Holiday is complete without an appropriate sensory box. For this year's Halloween sensory box we had dyed purple white beans, plastic bugs, a pail, and pinchers.

It took me many years to figure out how to best incorporate art into our homeschool schedule. A few years ago I found something called directed drawing. With directed drawings I draw with the children guiding them through each step of whatever we are drawing. 

It's so fun to see how everyone interprets the drawing assignment and creates their own personalized picture. Since we've been doing the directed drawings for several years now, it's really awesome to watch the children's drawing abilities improve.

We did a few specific tot school halloween activities. This project was to paint paper plate pumpkins with homemade puffy paint made with shaving cream. 

This particular project made a giant mess and the pumpkin paintings never dried (which meant they went in the trash ~ sigh. I prefer to keep the children's projects at least for the school year.) Despite the mess, the children really enjoyed the activity and were even disappointed when I took the paint away. 

 Next the younger crew made torn paper pumpkin collages. I free-handed a pumpkin on card stock and cut it out for the children to glue torn construction paper on them.

For some reason all of my children really seem to enjoy glueing, lol.

Yes, we love all the holidays around here and I try to collect movies and books that help us celebrate them accordingly. We have this cute collection of Peanuts Holiday movies. We watched the Halloween one as part of our Halloween festivities. 

Last we made Halloween Muddy Buddies. I shared this recipe here for those who are interested, and as an added bonus, it can easily be adapted for any holiday ~ yeah!

I won't lie, homeschooling is tough. Doing extra-curricular projects seldom plays out like I have it in my mind. There's ALWAYS fussing and complaining and usually some cross words. But, Lord willing my children will remember the 'highlight reel'. Nothing worth doing is typically easy to do and I have to remind myself of that fact quite often ~ especially when most of my days are spent in the trenches of child training. 

Our fun schooling weeks are my personal attempt to break up the homeschool monotony, lighten our academic load, and create treasured memories as a family. Even when the 'fun' weeks usually present their own difficulties and aren't as fun as I had hoped ~ I still keep trying. Because maybe just one day, our crazy, wild crew will get it together and it really will be the fun I had envisioned, lol.

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Halloween Craftivities

I know Halloween has come and gone, but I still wanted to go ahead and share how we celebrated the fun holiday this year. We aren't partakers in all the dark and evil aspects of the day, we just try to keep it light, fun, and full of make-believe.

As with every holiday we ALWAYS make cut out sugar cookies. I have buckets of cookie cutters and I truly cherish making the cookies with my children. For many years it was me pretty much doing everything and the kiddos just lending a hand hear and there when it came to baking cut-out sugar cookies. But, as they're getting older, my big kids are heading up our cookie baking fun these days. Whoop Whoop, now this mama can just sit back and take pictures and enjoy the festivities.

For the most part my boys are not all into the cookie baking, but I do make them take at least one turn to get a picture and make mama happy, lol. Thankfully my girlies really enjoy making the cookies, so I don't push the boys too much. 

Lydia continues to amaze me! She isn't even two yet and she had no problem icing her cookies. As a matter of fact she got quite upset when we took the cookies and icing away from her.

The children did an amazing job decorating the cookies this year. On a side note, I try to buy seasonal sprinkles after the holiday ~ trust me they don't go bad!

Next we made white chocolate covered pretzels and then sprinkled them with halloween colored sprinkles ~ because you know life is just way better with sprinkles!

One of our favorite halloween projects is to make Gak. This year everyone was mesmerized by the process and even took turns contributing to the making of our halloween Gak.

I gave the children an assortment of bugs to play with their gak.

The Gak kept my children entertained for HOURS!!!

Here's another fun food craftivity. DIY cookie spiders. Ok not exactly Pinterest worthy, but these were made by the hands of children not adults with too much free time, lol. My littles thought they were awesome and they thoroughly enjoyed eating them.

Our last halloween extra-curricular activity was a minute-to-win it game. In case you can't see, they're blowing plastic spiders across the floor with a straw, lol. Most years we do a snacktivity, craft, and a minute-to-win-it game daily for our Halloween fun schooling week; but this year it just wasn't happening. So I picked some of the easiest things we could do to still celebrate and not push this very pregnant mama over the edge of exhaustion. Which ended up being one activity per day as opposed to three activities.  

I ended up splitting our halloween fun week and our halloween tot school week into two weeks this year. It just worked better for me this year not to do them on the same week. Plus the little ones did get to do some of the bigger kids activities, even if they couldn't fully participate. 

While this wasn't our normal over-load of Halloween fun schooling, we still had a blast making memories and celebrating a fun holiday. 

(Without the gory, scary stuff that often overshadows the day!)

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer