Our Halloween Unit

I decided to do something different for this week, being Halloween soon.  I found every free printable I could to make a unit study for Halloween that I thought the boys would like. 

Here is what they did:

Thanks to my friend, Annick, we made a sensory bucket (dish) out of green gel beads, random halloween decorations, cupcake papers, cookie cutters and the boys had fun playing with those. The beads feel so weird, almost slimy, they love them. 

We also made gluten free pumpkin muffins (one thing I look forward to all year every year!), which I thought would be just fine, but nope. They did not fill my desire for pumpkin muffins at all, I couldn't even finish one. But the boys loved them, so I guess that's okay.

I thought it would be fitting to learn about the body in this unit study, the gross insides, the creepy skeletons. I found a kit on amazon that had a little bit of everything for them to learn about and put together to make a man they named Mr. Bob. They were pretty interested in learning about the human body and we checked out many different books from the library on it. They absorbed more than I had expected.

The boys worked on line tracing, cutting skills, and counting. Ethan is still learning to count to 20 and Tyler was just introduced to addition this week. It came very easy to him, I really couldn't believe it. Tyler put to together some puzzles that required putting the numbers in order to 20 and Ethan some did some that went up to number 10. I would write a random number on the pumpkin/witch math playdoh mat and the boys would have to make and lay down that many pumpkins which they thought was fun because they did silly thing with the pumpkins as you can see in Tyler's face in this middle left of the collage below. They both worked on sorting things from smallest to largest and putting things in groups of small, medium and large (the mummies in the bottom left made him very proud)

They are both working on recognizing and writing numbers,  and correct pencil grip.  In the bottom left, they had to count the number of witch hats on each card and lay it on the right number and they got them all correct and were very happy with themselves. We read a book called The Ugly Pumpkin, in which the pumpkin thinks he doesn't fit in because he doesn't look like the others, only to learn it's because he is a squash. It's actually a Thanksgiving book but I thought it was too cute to pass up. The boys then, without prompting, both created the ugly pumpkin out of playdoh while I read a book about farts and vomit and other gross thing that help your body- uhm, yeah it was gross so of course they found it hilarious. 

We worked on creating letters we have learned out of playdoh and writing on the little chalk board, because that is always so much more fun than paper. 

Tyler put numbers in order from 1 to 20 in the middle picture, and beside it did math problems that required him to choose which numbers to put in the blocks and then find the answer and he did so great! While Tyler used the bottom balls of the Abacus to add, Ethan used the top to practice counting. Then they had to choose a card of a halloween image, say the word and decide which sound box to put it in, the "p" or "g" sound- using the directions for teaching reading using phonographix from Reading Reflex.

We did a lot of fun things this week and I think they really enjoyed it. Along with all these things I talked about here,  the boys played online halloween games such as on pbskids- Curious George being one of their favorites. We carved pumpkins and Tyler wouldn't even touch his because of the smell and gross insides. But I have a few funny pictures of Ethan manning up and getting the job done even while gagging. I will have up add on here later when I get my card out of my camera again!  And as a last day of our unit celebration, we made a gluten free pumpkin pie And it was bad (the filling was a terrible recipe but the GF premade pie crust was actually great and not weird at all). But, once again, the boys liked it. :) 

Added the pumpkin and Halloween pics!